February 24, 9am-5pm and February 25 10am-6pm
UMC Aspen Rooms UMC 247
This year’s conference will feature 12 panels dedicated to a variety of topics and fields in graduate-level Asian Studies, including literature, history, media studies, cultural studies, linguistics, sociology, and religious studies. Each panel consists of three to four presentations (15 mins each) followed by discussion sessions (5-10 mins each), where students and faculty have the opportunity to ask questions and learn about the state of the field.
Keynote Speakers:
Professor Wai-Yee Li, Harvard University
"Chronicling Confucius"
Sima Qian (145-ca. 85 BCE), one of China’s greatest historians, gives us the first chronological account of the life of Confucius in his monumental Historical Records (Shiji). Scholars have often questioned its historical accuracy. I will not weigh in on issues of veracity but will focus instead on the power of storytelling and on the complex, ambiguous, and polyvalent construction of narrative in a textual universe where textual units often have fluid boundaries. I will discuss the following issues. 1. The consequence of chronology: how does chronology supply motives and contexts? How does our understanding of a saying or a story change when it is linked to a specific historical moment? 2. Chronicling Confucius draws attention to temporality, contingency, and expediency, expediency being a mode of reasoning and action tied to our embeddedness in time and confrontation with contingency. 3. Confronting contingency leads to uncertainty and sometimes failure. How does Sima Qian turn a broad arc of striving and setbacks into ultimate vindication? Is this vindication based on the cohesion or the fissures of the narrative? How does Sima Qian parry divergent perspectives as he weaves together accounts from different sources flourishing between Confucius’ lifetime and his own?
Professor Zev Handel, University of Washington
"The Development of Japanese Scripts From Chinese Characters in Comparative Context"
Chinese characters originated in China over 3,000 years ago. Prior to their creation, East Asia was completely devoid of writing. By the time of the Han Dynasty (202 BCE - 220 CE), China already had a long literary tradition, a flourishing culture, and a sophisticated government bureaucracy. Over subsequent centuries, Chinese writing exerted an enormous influence on surrounding peoples and places, including the areas of modern-day Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. Eventually the Chinese-character script was adapted to write the language spoken in these places. The adaptation of Chinese characters to the writing of Japanese, and their ultimate transformation into the kanji and kana scripts, is thus but one instance of a set of script adaptations that took place across East Asia. This talk presents a theoretical framework for understanding that adaptation in comparative context, and explains the ways in which the Japanese case is similar to and different from other historical adaptations of Chinese characters.
CUBASGA Graduate Student Conference
