Japanese Early Texts
DEALL offers a range of courses where the focus is, from one discipline or another, on texts and language from earlier times in Japan's history. While an introduction to the study of Japan's early texts is available at DEALL through courses on Japanese literature in translation and in linguistics taught with English-language materials, DEALL offers the unique opportunity to study the original early texts under the interdisciplinary guidance of faculty with expertise in historical linguistics, language pedagogy, East Asian writing systems, Heian and medieval literature, and traditional theatre.
All of these faculty take a hand in teaching our first courses in classical Japanese language, where your study of Japanese early texts begins. These courses focus on learning to read, by developing a familiarity with textual traditions, in study that integrates the lexical, grammatical, and phonological with the rhetorical and literary. In learning classical Japanese at DEALL, you get a solid grounding in philological concepts and tools, as well as answers to questions that, while crucial for understanding texts, too often go unasked or unanswered.
Graduate seminars in literature, linguistics, and theatre (including a performance component in noh) round out studies in Japanese early texts at DEALL, and offer any student's research the insights of another discipline. In studying literature, a grasp of phonology and grammar as rhetorical resources can help anchor and enhance critical research, whether its purposes are interpretive, comparative, or performative. For linguists, studying language in its texts reveals how a word's or a construction's situated uses inform its meanings or functions over time. Whatever your specialization, an awareness of genres, their emergence and constraints on expression, like an appreciation for how writing systems took hold and evolved as they have, is basic in imagining the communities, aspirations, and individuals behind the language and texts of earlier Japan. Coursework in Japanese Early Texts is also an important component in DEALL studies in the origins of the Japanese language.
Early Japanese Texts: core DEALL faculty
Courses taught primarily using translated texts
All of these faculty take a hand in teaching our first courses in classical Japanese language, where your study of Japanese early texts begins. These courses focus on learning to read, by developing a familiarity with textual traditions, in study that integrates the lexical, grammatical, and phonological with the rhetorical and literary. In learning classical Japanese at DEALL, you get a solid grounding in philological concepts and tools, as well as answers to questions that, while crucial for understanding texts, too often go unasked or unanswered.
Graduate seminars in literature, linguistics, and theatre (including a performance component in noh) round out studies in Japanese early texts at DEALL, and offer any student's research the insights of another discipline. In studying literature, a grasp of phonology and grammar as rhetorical resources can help anchor and enhance critical research, whether its purposes are interpretive, comparative, or performative. For linguists, studying language in its texts reveals how a word's or a construction's situated uses inform its meanings or functions over time. Whatever your specialization, an awareness of genres, their emergence and constraints on expression, like an appreciation for how writing systems took hold and evolved as they have, is basic in imagining the communities, aspirations, and individuals behind the language and texts of earlier Japan. Coursework in Japanese Early Texts is also an important component in DEALL studies in the origins of the Japanese language.
Early Japanese Texts: core DEALL faculty
- Shelley Fenno Quinn (Ph.D., Indiana University)
- Naomi Fukumori (Ph.D., Columbia University)
- Charles J. Quinn (Ph.D., University of Michigan)
- James M. Unger (Ph.D., Yale University)
Courses taught primarily using translated texts
- Japanese 251, Pre-modern Japanese Literature in Translation
- Japanese 654, Japanese Literature: Classical Period
- Japanese 655, Japanese Literature: Medieval and Edo Periods
- Japanese 681, History of the Japanese Language
- EALL 677, Performance Traditions in Contemporary East Asia
- EALL 683, Scripts of East Asia
- Medieval & Renaissance Studies (MRS) 211, Medieval Kyoto: Portraits and Landscapes
- Japanese 601, Classical Japanese I, introductory
- Japanese 602, Classical Japanese II, with linguistic focus
- Japanese 603, Classical Japanese II, with literary focus
- Japanese 600, Performance Traditions of Japan (with performance practicum)
- Japanese 751, Studies in Japanese Poetry
- Japanese 752, Studies in Japanese Prose Literature
- Japanese 753, Studies in Japanese Drama
- Japanese 877, Topics and Problems in Japanese Literature
- Japanese 887, Topics and Problems in Japanese Linguistics
