CEAS Colloquium Series
Mengxi bitan (Conversations with a Writing Brush) by the 11th-century Chinese scholar Shen Kuo (1031-1095) and writings by several other Chinese writers provide a useful framework within which one can discuss the dialectical relationship between the poisonous and the medicinal, and to examine the curing of the human body as a political metaphor for the governing of a state. Medicine, poison, and the body politic thus become appropriate themes for a comparative study that crosses the boundaries of the East and the West and eventually leads to a new reading of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, in...
The ten oldest wooden buildings in East Asia are in Japan, four of them at the monastery Horyuji. Less well-known and less well-documented than Japan’s buildings of the sixth and seventh centuries are China’s ten earliest wooden buildings, dated late eighth to early tenth century. Even less is known about Korea’s first centuries of Buddhist architecture. This talk explores extant architecture, archaeological evidence, and literary descriptions to determine what we really know about the first centuries of Buddhist architecture in East Asia and if longstanding notions of its major monuments...
Please note this lecture will be in Chinese with English translation provided
In Japan, widely tolerated daytime napping or inemuri is frequently associated with and explained by curtailed nocturnal sleep. In the case of ambitious high school students this takes the form of napping in class after many hours of required nighttime study. In this presentation Dr. Steger will attempt to explain the anthropological and sociological background behind this apparent paradox.
While in other works, Professor Childs has argued that physical coercion (rape) was not as common in the literature of the Japanese court as some scholars suggest, in this lecture she will explore the many and varied ways in which male characters use psychologically coercive strategies in their pursuit of romance. Professor Childs will also discuss the corollary issue of women’s reluctance to accept suitors. While the texts often suggest, and readers commonly assume, that women were focused on finding a man they could trust, she will argue that what many women most deeply desired was ...
This lecture will examine a series of ideological conversions (tenkô)that the critic Kamei Katsuichirô (1907-1966) went through from the late 1920s.
This lecture will look at three categories of Chinese writers and their relationships with the Communist Party: the state-sanctioned writers who both legitimize, and benefit from, the political system; the dissident writers who, in refusing to toe the line, face isolation and imprisonment; and finally, the exile writers who escaped to the West but continue to write about political themes. Please note this lecture will be in Mandarin Chinese.
In her prose fiction, contemporary writer Sakiyama Tami focuses on a particular topos – the island – rendered shima in katakana, the syllabary reserved for things foreign. As her orthographic choice suggests, Sakiyama’s is a defamiliarized island that stands in stark contrast to widely circulated images of Okinawa, which appear in film, television, print journalism, and tourist brochures. Professor Bhowmik argue that Sakiyama’s method of writing through a dance of words destabilizes the very ground her texts seek to depict, creating instead an island freed from the romantic discourse of...
Japan recently instituted a comprehensive reform of its social pension system. This paper assesses how important these reforms are likely to be in resolving Japan’s fiscal woes. Professor Weinstein believes that the Koizumi reforms will be sufficient to prevent a fiscal crisis in Japan under many reasonable scenarios.
Please note this lecture will be given in Chinese
Sculpture was produced in large quantities over a long period of time in China as architectural ornaments, mortuary works, or objects of religious use. But sculpture was not often considered an object of special aesthetic value. The subject of the current research is the movement of Chinese sculpture, with special attention to Buddhist and Daoist works, from a category of non-art into one of the fine arts. In the process, a heretofore unknown kind of object and knowledge - something called “Chinese sculpture” as well as a history of this art form - came into being as modern facts. In this...
Please note this lecture will be given in Chinese
Copies of The Rendez-Vous: Poems of Multicultural Experience (Peter Lang Publishing, August 2003) are currently available at The Yale Bookstore! A special book signing party will follow at The Yale Bookstore at 6:00 PM Barnes & Noble, 77 Broadway, New Haven, CT Telephone: (203) 777-8440
In authoritarian regimes, people learn to play it safe. Truth is a scarce commodity. Interviewees are people who have learned to be complicitous to survive. Memory is shaped and mis-shaped by all of these forces and more. Therefore learning the truth about the impact of politics and policy in a place like Mao’s China or even post-Mao China requires innovative approaches. This talk is about how such work was done over 3 dozen or so visits to rural China over a quarter of a century.
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