Antiquity in Song China and Meiji Japan

In this course, we will engage in an in-depth study of the concept of antiquity in the intellectual and artistic context of Medieval China and Modern Japan. We will devote one week to Meiji Japan and the second to Medieval China. The two weeks can be taken independently as individual courses as well as jointly as a single two-week course. In the case of Meiji Japan, we will start from a paradox: while the Meiji government was modernizing Japan on an all-encompassing level, they also attempted to return to a mythical "antiquity" ideologically, religiously, and intellectually. We will analyze the ways in which the antique world of myth in fact influenced the world of modernization in Meiji Japan through closely reading works of key thinkers (Motoori Norinaga and Hirata Atsutane) and analyzing artworks of the period. We will attempt to discuss conceptions of antiquity based on artworks ranging from ukiyo-e paintings to contemporary Japanese anime culture. During this workshop, we will discuss how antiquity was thought, imagined and continued in the contemporary Japanese avant-garde movement of art, media and music. Our second week will focus on how the medieval Song Dynasty of China responded to and reconstructed the ancient Chinese past. Meiji-era Japanese intellectuals identified the Song Dynasty as the first "modern" society, but this time of flourishing urban life and constant technological and cultural changes was also a time that turned to China’s distant past to find both models for the future and objects of consumption. Did this period’s thinkers define "antiquity" as a distant past because it helped enhance the pleasure of appreciating exotic antiques, or because it provided the keys to authentic life? We will attempt to answer this question through closely reading passages from the key thinkers (Zhu Xi and Ouyang Xiu) and study paintings and material objects in the context of connoisseur theory to interrogate the Song reconstruction of ancient Chinese ideas. This course will be a reading intensive workshop with extensive visual materials. This course aims to cultivate close reading skills, to strengthen and deepen critical reading, writing, and interpretive practices, and to further students' understanding of the interconnections between a diversity of imagined pasts and modernizing processes across the world.