February 23

Class today is cancelled.

Instead, please view the documentary film, "The Illustrated Handscroll Tale of Genji" (VHS 3060).

The film is 68 minutes long.

We have still not discussed Chapters 5 and 6, so it's okay just to look over those chapters again to prepare for next Tuesday's class.

February 21

We're moving quite slowly, but here are the things we've talked about in the past couple of sessions:


Chapter 3


Nara (Heijô kyô) - intended to be the last permanent capital of Japan but only lasted until 794; modern city of Nara. The Nara Period (710-794). Strong influences from abroad, especially Korea and China.

Shintô Shrines

Izumo Taisha
Ise Jingû

Buddhist Temples and their Art

A. Asuka / Hakuhô Period

1) Hôryû-ji (near site of imperial regent Shôtoku Taishi's 聖徳太子 Wakakusadera temple)

Tamamushi Shrine - Jataka tales

Asuka Period Painting and Sculpture
Influences: non-East Asian=Scythian, Central Asian

Korean: Korean kingdom of Koguryô: Tori's Shaka Triad
Korean kingdom of Paekche: Miroku Bosatsu
Chinese: Tang: Gakkô
Yumetagai (Yumechigai) "Dream Changing
Kannon
Amida
Horyûji murals

B. Tempyô Period

2) Tôdai-ji

Temple and Great Buddha sculpture

3) Tôshôdai-ji

Temple

Chapter 4

Heian-kyô - capital of Japan 794 - 1868; modern city of Kyôto. Heian Period (794-1185). Influences from abroad less strong.

New capital, new Buddhisms:

Tendai; Saichô; Mt. Hiei; Lotus Sutra
Shingon; Kûkai; Mt. Kôya; mandalas
Pure Land (Jôdo); Kûya; raigô (visit of Buddha at believer's death)

Fujiwara Period (897-1185)

Imperial / regent system (especially the Fujiwara family as Kampaku or Sesshô=regent)

1) Buddhist Art

Byôdô-in Phoenix Hall Temple + Garden
mandala (map of the Buddhist cosmos) hanging scrolls
raigô (visit of Buddha at believer's death) hanging scrolls
Heike nôgyô illuminated sutra (Lotus sutra) handscroll
Shigisan engi handscroll [scroll of the legend of Mt. Shigi] (flying granary scene)

2) Secular Art

Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari) Handscroll
Chôjû giga (Funny pictures of birds and beasts) narrative scroll
Tale of the Heiji disturbance (Heiji monogatari) Handscroll

3) Calligraphy

4) Terms

Yamato-e (Japanese pictures)
onna-e ("feminine" painting style pictures) built-up layers of color, related to Yamato-e; outlines less
important than in otoko-e, below
onna-de ("feminine" hand=hiragana=Japanese script)

otoko-e ("masculine" painting style pictures) monochromatic or lightly colored; related to Chinese style, calligraphic line (like Chôjû giga)

hikime kagihana (simplified faces, example in Genji scroll; lit., line for eye, hook for nose)
fukinuki yatai (blown-off roof style)

Thinking about your paper

I. How to develop a topic for the research paper

There are lots of guides that walk you through the process of figuring out a topic for a research paper. I've given you a link to Emory's own, below, in (II.1).

The best way to start is with paper and a pencil. Ask yourself what kinds of things interest you about Japanese art and literature. What kinds of things would you like to find out more about? Is there something in the literary or visual culture of another world area that has interested you in the past, and you'd like to see if the same things are true in the Japanese context? Is there a historical period that you're drawn to? Is there a particular aspect of the culture or society (religion, politics, the environment, etc.) that you think might have had some bearing on the development of Japanese literature and visual culture, and you want to explore it further?

Pick up the pencil, and write. It doesn't have to be complete sentences--it's okay to have vague ideas to start. Just follow your instincts, and see where they lead.

What are you curious about?


II. Useful Web Sites

1. Developing a Research Topic

Emory's general guide to thinking about papers. Lots of good stuff here, including advice about how to cite your sources.

2. EUCLID

3. Doing Research in East Asian Studies at Emory

This list of sources was developed for my Freshman Seminar, Introduction to East Asian Studies. Scroll down to the "Databases" section. The databases that will be most useful to you are:

Bibliography of Asian Studies
JSTOR

I've never used Project Muse, it may be helpful. The MLA bibliography is probably not going to be helpful.

At the bottom of this list is a link that gives you tips about style in citing sources.

4. Databases

Visit EUCLID's databases page and select "Art, Architecture and Art History" from the pull-down menu.

5. Bibliography of Early Modern Japanese Art, Architecture, and Gardens

The early modern period is from 1600-1868. This is a PDF included in the online reserve materials.

6. Talk to people

I'd be delighted to talk over your research interests with you. You might also get help from the research librarians at Woodruff--either just by walking up to them at the information desk on the ground floor, or by making an appointment with one of the specialist librarians in East Asian Studies or Art History. I can help you get in touch with them.



You might also browse:

Asia Society's Guide to Japanese Art. It's probably more helpful if you know what sort of genre you're interested in (painting, prints, etc.) but it doesn't hurt to start looking here.

Duke has a nice guide to their collection in Japanese Art History. There are two problems with it for us: 1) the materials are at Duke, and while many may be available through interlibrary loan, some may not be and 2) some of the materials are in Japanese. Still, it's worth browsing--at the end of the page is a fabulous list of materials on the WWW.

February 9

We first talked about the midterm exam, and about the papers. We decided that the midterm exam would be due on March 7, and that the question for the same would be distributed on March 5.

I said I'd get together some resources to help students think about formulating a paper topic and beginning their research. In broadest terms, the paper ideally should:

explore some aspect of literature and art in Japan; or at least,
explore some aspect of literature or art in Japan; and preferably,
explore some aspect of literature and/or art in Japan, and not be a comparative study of Japanese art/literature and that of another world area.

Discussion:

We talked about the differences between the indigenous religion of Japan--its modern name is Shintô (literally, the way of the gods) and Buddhism. Both Shintô and Buddhism have had a great impact on Japanese art; they've managed to co-exist fairly peacefully thoughout Japanese history in part because they address different aspects of life.

There was a handout that contrasted these two systems; take a look at it and make sure you understand the terms it lists.

Keywords:

kami (deity)
shrine
Amaterasu
Ise Jingû
Izumo Taisha
Buddha
bodhisattva
temple
Four Noble Truths of Buddhism
karma (deeds, actions)
nirvana (extinction) and Enlightenment
Amida
Kannon
Yakushi
sutra (Buddhist scripture)

We visited the website of Ise Jingû and took a look at some of its interactive modules.

We started to look at some of the images from Chapter 3, including Izumo Taisha, Ise Jingû, Hôryû-ji temple, and the Tamamushi Shrine (not to be confused with a Shintô shrine).

HANDOUT:

Japanese religions: Shintô and Buddhism

FOLLOW UP:

For Chapter 3, Asuka and Nara

Take a look at the film of Hôryû-ji temple on the Blackboard site
Pictures of Hôryû-ji and Tôdai-ji are at Oriental Architecture (click on the left for Japan and then on the left again for each site)

LOOKING AHEAD:

For Chapter 4, Heian

Take a look at the film of Byôdô-in on the Blackboard site.
Other views of Byôdô-in are available at the following sites:
Bowdoin's Japanese garden (interactive garden tour)
Oriental Architecture (virtual tour; click on the left for Japan and then on the left again for Byôdô-in)

February 7

We started the discussion by taking a look at some of the tools used to paint and write in Japan, again thanks to Clara O'Shea. We saw:

ink (sumi) a deep black ink made from the soot of burnt wood;
inkstone (suzuri) can be made of various non-porous stones;
brush (fude) typically bamboo and animal fur.

We talked about the Japanese writing system. The Japanese writing system uses four kinds of script:

1. kanji (Chinese characters, originally developed in China to write Chinese)

2. hiragana (representations of the syllables of Japanese, developed from cursive forms of kanji; used in both the pre-modern and modern periods to write Japanese words)

3. katakana (representations of the syllables of Japanese, developed from parts of kanji; used originally to write the pronunciation of Chinese characters in sacred texts, now used to write foreign words and to add emphasis)

4. romaji (Roman letters)

We then started looking at some examples of the art of prehistoric Japan.

Key words to remember:

Jômon
Yayoi
Kofun
haniwa

In the discussion, some people pointed out how similar the artifacts that we were looking at were to those of civilizations at a comparable stage of development, despite the fact that any contact or cultural exchange between them was unlikely.

As we continue to look at Japanese art through history, see if you notice any motifs or other aspects of form or taste that seem to recur. For instance, the wave pattern on the bronze bell; the cuteness of the haniwa; the shape of architecture (albeit this is something we only know through reconstructions as actual examples have disappeared).

What can these artifacts tell us about the contact people living in Japan at this time might have had with their neighbors on the continent?

What can these artifacts tell us about the religious beliefs of their owners?

HANDOUT:

Japanese Writing Systems

February 2

We were treated to an introduction to Clara O'Shea's beautiful sumi-e (ink paintings) and the materials used to create them.

We also started our overview of Japanese art history, starting with a discussion of the "Introduction" to Joan Stanley-Baker's Japanese Art.

Japanese Art History: Two Directions

The introduction describes a pendulum-like movement to the development of Japanese art, swinging between looking outward (towards cultural influences from the continent, i.e. China and Korea and then from Europe and America) and inward (away from them).

The eras in which exchanges with the continent were particularly strong were:

Asuka/Nara (552-794)
Kamakura/Muromachi (1185-1573)
Meiji (1868-1912)
Modern period (1912- )

The eras which Stanley-Baker describes as "insular" were:

Heian (794-1185)
Momoyama (1576-1603)
Early Modern [a.k.a. Edo or Tokugawa] (1603-1868)

Differences in Chinese and Japanese aesthetic sensibility

Stanley-Baker finds opposing characteristics in Chinese and Japanese art.

CHINA
solidity
depth
grandeur
perfection
sumptuousness

JAPAN
layered
emotional
minuteness
nuanced
irregularity
frugality

She mentions the low-key aesthetics of Japanese cuisine. Take a look at this page for some pictures of kaiseki (formal) meals. Unfortunately this kind of food is hard to find in Atlanta and costs a fortune wherever you get it.

The poem that concludes the chapter is by the medieval poet Shinkei; it speaks of the connection between:

impermanence
change
deep feeling

Reading for the next class:

We'll be talking about Chapters 2 and 3 next time. This weekend I'll post some images, including a short film that walks you around the grounds of Hôryû-ji temple, made by me.
.................

Handout:
Japanese pronunciation / Map of Early Japan

Images:
Check the Blackboard site for images.

January 31

We continued our discussion of "Introduction" to The Chinese Painter as Poet.

This chapter compares European and Chinese views on the relationship between poetry and painting, and then examines a variety of Chinese sources that discuss this relationship.

Europe

Simonides of Ceos (Greek, c. 556-468 BCE), "Painting is mute poetry, and poetry is a speaking picture."
Horace (Roman, 65 BCE-8 BCE), "as in painting, so in poetry" (ut pictura poesis).

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781), the German playwright and poet, in Laocoön, rejects the "sister arts" theory, "In poetry it has engendered a mania for description and in painting a mania for allegory, by attempting to make the former a speaking picture, without actually knowing what it could and ought to paint, and the latter a silent poem, without having considered to what degree it is able to express ideas without denying its true function."

The name Laocoön refers to a story in Greek mythology; Laocoön angered Poseidon by trying to warn the Trojans about the Greeks' gift-horse, sending sea serpents to strangle him and his sons. A picture of the famous Hellenistic sculpture depicting the climactic moment of this story is here (scroll down to the bottom of the page). Lessing's treatise discusses this sculpture. He argues that painting and poetry have different functions: painting can only depict the events of a single moment; poetry can depict movement over time.

British poet Matthew Arnold (1822-188) expressed Lessing's views in a poem "Epilogue to Lessing's Laocoön."

China

The "sister arts" theory also developed in China. Su Shi (1037-1101, a.k.a. Su Dongpo) also compared poetry and painting, saying that the poetry of Du Fu was "formless painting" and the painting of Han Gan was "unspeaking poetry." Also, the fact that narrative handscroll painting was an important form of Chinese painting might seem to forestall the development of theories about the antagonism between the two arts. However, the situation was rather more complex than that.

Wang Maolin (1640-1688): Poems are superior to paintings; paintings cannot convey the same level of detail that poems can.

Zhang Dai (1597?-1686): "If one does paintings on the basis of painting possessing poetic verses, his painting cannot be good; while if one writes poetry on the basis of verse having a pictorial idea, his poetry will inevitably be unskillful," i.e. arguing that poetry shouldn't try to do the same thing that pictures do.

The beginning of ideas about the connection between poetry and painting date from very early times, however.

A New Account of Tales of the World (Shishuo xinyu) compiled by Liu Yiqing (403-444) talks about it in two places:

Dai Kui: Fan Xuan begins to understand the value of painting after Dai Kui paints pictures illustrating a poem.

Gu Kaizhi: This painter tried to translate poetry into painted image, but was frustrated by his inability to depict the idea of "escorting the homing goose," emphasizing painting's limitations.

Yu Xin: his poems "are the rist to describe paintings without referring to their models in nature" (Cynthia Chennault), writing poems in praise of paintings of scenery.

The first "poet-painter" was Wang Wei (698-761). Though none of his paintings survive, glowing descriptions of them do, as do numerous poems.

The connection between poetry and painting continued to deepen, and it became common practice to combine poems and paintings, and for poets to paint and vice versa.

Readings for the next class

We will take a look at Chapters 1 and 2 of Japanese Art.

Does the "Introduction" have a thesis, and if so what is it?

In Chapter 2, do any the objects look like those of any other artistic tradition? To put it another way, how are they similar, how are they different, and how do you account for this?