ASIAN 6629 - [Contemporary Studies of Japan]

Fall. Next offered 2020-2021. 4 credits. Student option grading.

Prerequisite: advanced level of fluency in Japanese.

N. Sakai.

The class is conducted in the Japanese language but the reading assignments are mostly in English. This course is offered to help graduate students meet the new demands of contemporary East Asian studies. These demands are summarized under three headings: (1) a shift in what is expected of scholarship on East Asia, (2) the intellectual and cultural situation surrounding Asian Studies, and (3) the change in the disciplines in their modus operandi in the Humanities. Here, what is meant by the ‘contemporaneity’ of knowledge production means the dialogic mode of inquiry in which students do not investigate or speak on the exotic objects of their inquiry but address to and speak with the intellectuals /scholars working and studying in East Asia as interlocutors. (SC)