Updated schedule for final project now available on
this webpage. Due dates will be included in daily briefings and weekly schedule to help you stay on top of everything. Needless to say: I’m flexible with
due dates if you get hit by whatever personal stuff that may come your way during this time. Just contact me with a suggestion for a new reasonable due date that fits
your schedule.
Note: The
Canvas Homepage is used to gather sensitive information: links to our Zoom sessions, passwords for accessing PDFs and the shared password for protecting your posts are all there. I share a lot of my course information with the wider world, but we don’t need anyone to crash the party!
Here’s the schedule for the week: tasks, assignments and reading all gathered on one handy webpage. (Scroll down for the
readings we will cover this week)
Schedule
- Monday (anytime before midnight): reflection on the past two weeks of upheaval. This first week will not be entirely representative of what the rest of the semester will look like, but I still would like you to write a reflection based on your cumulative experience in all classes during this week, not just this one. I offer some questions for guidance, but you can take a different perspective.
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- What have you learned about yourself, and about your learning process during this first (short) week of remote learning and the run up? (i.e from March 9 to March 20)
- What surprised you? (Positive and negative)?
- What are the challenges you faced, and what strategies or assistance will you need to overcome them?
- What has this experience taught you about face-to-face class time?
- What are you proud of achieving this week? From “not freaking out” to “figuring out how to share my screen in Zoom”, nothing is too small to celebrate at this point.
- Write approx. 300 words. As always: you can go longer if you have more to say, but I prefer substance over quantity.
- Post on your website as a blog post in the category HST107
- You can password-protect your post if you choose, please use the one on the Canvas Homepage right above the cat picture.
- Monday (anytime before midnight) Project Pitch: pitch the basic idea, and give reasons why you are interested in this particular topic.
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- Dig a bit deeper than “dragons are cool” (they are, we agree)
- What in the course so far has guided you to this topic?
- What in the readings or the topics portal has sparked your curiosity?
- Length: 300-500 words
- Post on your site as a blog post, category HST107
- Note: you are not yet locked in, but this indicates a general direction
- Tuesday Zoom session 4pm (link on Canvas Homepage): check in with your classmates, talk about the final project and your ideas, or about the course materials for the week.
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- Note: Add to your calendar: Tue March 31 and Tue April 14 are “mandatory” meetings to talk about the Pressbooks project. Be there! (usual exceptions of illness etc. apply)
- Tuesday (anytime before midnight): First post on the Canvas discussion board due.
- Wednesday (anytime before midnight) : Two responses to other students’ posts due, on the Canvas discussion board.
- Thursday Zoom session 4pm (link on Canvas Homepage): “regular class”: we will go into more detail about the course materials for the week, based on the discussions.
- Thursday (anytime before midnight) List of sources (articles, books, sites) you have identified as potentially useful so far:
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- Includes “I haven’t looked through this yet but I think it might be useful”, “based on the title,…”, or “I saw a reference to this in another text but I’m waiting on the [Inter]library Loan.”
- Indicate what makes you think this is possibly useful or how it connects to your project idea.
- Aim for at least 3 potential sources.
- Share as google doc, and allow me editing access: this gives us a space to build a collective bibliography for your project.
- Note: no “weekly writing exercise” for the end of the week: you will be busy with your project, focus on that. (And reach out by email or groupme for assistance)
Readings/course contents: Foxy!
Please read
both texts. On Tuesday we will gather on Zoom, and we can talk through some of the thorny points in the secondary reading, so you’re all set for a successful discussion on Canvas. We will encounter concepts from the secondary reading later in the semester again, so it’s an important one. Foxes were (and still are) devious creatures in Chinese culture. Both male and female fox spirits or fox fairies are attested in historical records and anecdotes, but it is the female fox that was considered the most dangerous. She would find a human lover, and then exploit his
yang energy to balance out her excessive
yin energy, and often kill him as a result. So what happens when an innocent man in Tang dynasty Chang’an encounters a fox-fairy? Read the story of “Miss Ren”. There is more material on foxes than I can possibly fit into a single session- late imperial fiction has many stories about foxes, too, and a few good studies. (Tip: this would make a nice research project.)
- Primary source: “Miss Ren, or the Fox Lady” (Renshi zhuan). An Anthology of Translations: Classical Chinese Literature. Vol. 1: From Antiquity to the Tang Dynasty. Edited by John Minford and Joseph S. M. Lau, pp. 1024-1032. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. (PDF)
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- Miss Ren is a fox- and we, the readers, know from the start. How does the author play with us, with the conventions of story-telling, and with the genre of the anecdote?
- Secondary source: Kang, Xiaofei, The Cult of the Fox, 14-43. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2006. (ebook Trexler)
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- Chapter 1 “Foxes in Early Chinese Tradition”
- Useful background to trace the evolution of the fox spirit in traditional Chinese thought.
- We can use this text to understand more about the complex set of ideas that makes up fox-lore in premodern China. What makes foxes one of the more successful types of demons? Be sure to trace the argument of the author: what is the point she is trying to make, and what evidence does she provide? How does the image of the fox demon change over the centuries?
- Note: if you have trouble getting into the Library, please contact me. Here’s a quick video walking you through how to access an ebook on Jstor when you’re off campus.
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- TOP TIP: A good way to tackle the secondary text is to write a “three sentence summary” of each of the major sections: “The demonic divinity”, “In and out: Fox spirits and late Tang society”; “Fox exorcism and the suppression of the fox cult”. It may take some time, but it requires you to engage with the text at a much deeper level than just reading for basic information.
- Slides for Zoom session (Gdrive link)
- Zoom session: look for the date on this Canvas Page.
Optional extras:
- The following book is also useful if you want to work on foxes in Late Imperial China (1368-1644): Huntington, Rania. Alien Kind : Foxes and Late Imperial Chinese Narrative. Harvard East Asian Monographs, 222. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003. (Link to file on Gdrive)
- Late Imperial fox stories from Pu Songling’s Stories from a Chinese Studio (Liaozhai zhi yi) available on request.
