Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Studies a specific Asian religious tradition through the cultural and historical contexts that structure religious meaning. Students may repeat this course once for further credit under a different topic. Breadth-Humanities.

COURSE DETAILS:

Confucian Ethics and Gender in the Context of Modern East Asia 

The ideas associated with Confucius (Kōngzi 孔子), known misleadingly as “Confucianism” outside East Asia, are identified more helpfully with the Rú 儒, or “literati,” of ancient through early modern China, and later, Korea and Japan. Helpfully, because Rú 儒 designates a social group and as social values, power dynamics, and politics evolve so do social groups as is reflected both in their composition and relationship to power. The essentialist European construction represented by “Confucianism,” assumes a fixed teaching stuck in the past with outdated views ill-positioned to address contemporary issues of, for example, constitutional governance and civic virtue, property rights, social welfare, mediation, and justice. Further, the “Confucian” edifice has been viewed as either irrelevant or positively harmful in relation to feminist critiques and ways of understanding gender. 

We will commence with a reading of two foundational classics compiled or composed during the Warring States period of Chinese history (475-221): Analects of Confucius (Lúnyǔ 論語) and the Mencius (Mèngzi 孟子). With a basic understanding of these texts, and the ideas they contain, we will then move on to two collections of essays that situate those ideas in relation to feminist critique and social, political, economic, ecological, and educational concerns in contemporary East Asia and beyond.

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

Learning Outcomes

• Enhance skills in critically assessing complex arguments in academic articles. 
• Develop skills in organizing an extended paper, using sources effectively, linking claims to evidence, and forming clear logically consistent arguments. 
• Gain and demonstrate familiarity with classical Confucian views concerning political and social order, personal cultivation, and the function of ritual structures applied to human life.
• Become familiar with some basic ideas concerning democracy, ethics, and feminist perspectives originating out of cultural insights of both East Asian and European heritage.
• Develop an appreciation for the complexities involved in intercultural dialogue. 

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING:

REQUIRED READING NOTES: