Transcript Bay, Alex - East

Infusing my curriculum
Alex Bay
Associate
Professor
Chapman
University
History 262: History of the Samurai
• Into a predominantly political and social history approach, I will add a
two-week section on samurai religion/spirituality
• Initial week will consist of lecturing on the history of Shinto and
Buddhism from the 6th century onward as well as Ch’an coming to
Japan as Zen and some discussion.
• Readings:
– Miyazaki Fumiko, “Religious Life of the Kamakura Bushi: Kumagai Naozane and
his Descendants,” Monumenta Nipponica 47:4 (1992): 435-67.
– Muso Kokushi, Dream Conversations on Buddhism and Zen, trans. Thomas
Cleary (Boston: Shambhala, 1996).
– Peter Hershock, Chan Buddhism (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004).
(Selections?)
History 262: History of the Samurai
• Week Two consists of a discussion of Takuan Soho,
The Unfettered Mind: Writing from a Zen Master to
a Master Swordsman (Boston: Shambhala, 2012) as
well as their papers (3-pages, based on the readings
for these two weeks), possible prompt: How have
warriors in Japan engaged Buddhism from the
ancient to the early modern period?
• Friday, religious studies professor Carmichael Peters
will lead us in a sitting session during class.
Approaches to Asian Studies: Interdisciplinarity in
Action
• 100-level class, aimed at hooking freshmen into the
Asian Studies minor (a major is down the road a bit)
• Learning Outcomes:
– Students will learn both Asia-related content and
different disciplinary approaches to its study.
– Students will use disciplinary frameworks of these fields
to ask questions about and analyze primary materials, in
translation, relating to Asian religion, literature, art
history, history, anthropology, polisci, and film.
7GC/Global Study SLO: Connects contemporary social and/or environmental
topics to their origins and analyzes their effects on our increasingly
globalized world
• 1. Cultural/ Global Self Awareness
• Basic - Shows basic awareness of the diversity inherent in their own social
and/or natural environments and/or other contemporary societies or
cultures, or in our world at large.
• 2. Knowledge
• Basic - Shows surface understanding of the complexity of diverse social
and/or environmental topics, customs, beliefs, traditions, lifestyles, biases,
assumptions, and prejudices connected to cultural and/or natural diversity
and their origins/effects
•
• 3. Critical Skills
• Basic - Asks superficial questions about other cultures and environments,
recognizes multiple perspectives and limits in their own and other
perspectives.
Weeks 1-2: A Genealogy of the Present
What exactly was/is Asian Studies?
• Edward Said, Orientalism (NY: Vintage, 1979), Introduction.
• Maribeth E. Cameron, “Far Eastern Studies in the United States”
The Far Eastern Quarterly 7:2 (1948): 115-35.
• Wm. Theodore De Bary, “The Association of Asian Studies:
Nonpolitical but not Unconcerned,” The Journal of Asian Studies
29:4 (1970): 751-59.
• Robert E. Ward, “Presidential Address: The Case for Asian
Studies,” The Journal of Asian Studies 32:3 (1973): 391-403.
• Learning Places: The Afterlife of Area Studies, ed. Masao
Miyoshi and Harry Harootunian (Durham: Duke University Press,
2002), selections.
Weeks 3-4 Religion/Philosophy
• Main point of these reading would be to set up the
foundations for tracking themes through lit. and art.
• Robert Campany, “On the Very Idea of Religion,” History of
Religions 42:4 (2003): 287-319.
• Isabelle Robinet, Taoism: Growth of a Religion (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1997), selections.
• Donald Lopez, Religions of China in Practice (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1996), selections.
• Selections of Confucian, Doaist and Buddhist primary docs,
stressing the conversation between the texts.
Week 5-6: Literature part 1
• Michael Ryan, An Introduction to Criticism:
Literature/Film/Culture (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012),
selections.
• Tony Barnstone, The Art of Writing: Teachings of the
Chinese Masters (Boston: Shambhala, 1996).
• Wu Ching-tzu, The Scholars (Foreign Languages Press,
2000).
• I want some kind of paper assignment analyzing
these two works (or parts of them, at least) in terms
of seeing the connection between
philosophy/religion and writing in premodern China –
a practice rather than theory approach.
Week 5-6: Literature part 2
• Georg Simmel, The Metropolis and Mental Life,
selections.
• Edward Seidensticker, Tokyo from Edo to Showa 18671989: The Emergence of the World’s Greatest City,
selections.
• Maeda Ai, The Text and the City: Essays on Japanese
Modernity, ed. James Fuji (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2004), Ch. 5 on Kawabata.
• Kawabata Yasunari, The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa
• A possible writing assignment for The Scarlet Gang on
how the modern city contributed to new forms of story
telling in Japan?
Week 7-8: Art
• Laurie Schneider Adams, The Methodologies of Art: An
Introduction, 2nd ed., (Westview Press, 2009), Ch. 1, What is Art?
• Denise Patry Leidg, The Art of Buddhism: An Introduction to its
History and Meaning (Boston: Shambhala, 2008), selections.
• Robert Fisher, Buddhist Art and Architecture (NY: Thames and
Hudson, 1993), selections.
• Joan Piggot, The Emergence of Japanese Kingship (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1997), Ch. 7 Shomu Tenno: Servant of
the Buddha
• I want to focus on the Buddhist silk road, ending with the 752
eye-painting ceremony, carried out by Indian monk Bodhisena,
of the Great Buddha in Todaiji, as a way to conceptualize the
spread of Buddhism and art from India to China, through Korea,
to Japan.
Weeks 9-10 History
• Richard Evans, In the Defense of History (W.W. Norton and
Co., 2000), selections.
• Paul Cohen, History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event,
Experience and Myth (NY: Columbia University Press, 1998),
selections.
• Rashomon, film. What really happened?
• Use Memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Messages from
Hibakusha database for a 3-page paper assignment using
Cohen’s concepts to analyze the history and memory of the
bomb.
– (http://www.asahi.com/hibakusha/e/)
Weeks 11-12
• Anthropology/Sociology
– Introduction to ideas, methods and approaches
– Ethnographic reading/s giving students a sense of
how anthropologists write
– Use film as an ethnographic exercise and have the
students write a paper
Other disciplines
• Weeks 13-14 Political science
– Chinese politics?
– Japan’s one- (and a half) party system?
Weeks 15-16 Film studies
Michael Ryan, An Introduction to Criticism:
Literature/Film/Culture (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012),
selections.
謝謝