ASIAN 6025

More-than-Human Worlds: Ghosts, Animals, and Insects in East Asian Tradition

Course Description

Course information provided by the 2026-2027 Catalog.

This upper-level seminar explores how East Asian literary, religious, and cultural traditions have imagined worlds shared by humans and nonhuman beings. Focusing on the ways in which the boundary between the human and the nonhuman is defined, contested, and reconfigured, the course engages in close readings of theoretical and primary texts featuring ghosts, animals, insects, objects, disability, and the figures of the barbarian other. Students will analyze how nonhuman agents unsettle anthropocentric assumptions and articulate alternative ontologies of life, agency, and relationality. Drawing on contemporary theoretical frameworks such as posthumanism, multispecies studies, and ecocriticism, the course invites students to reconsider what it meant?and what it might mean?to inhabit a world that is fundamentally more-than-human. (ASIAN-LL)

Prerequisites Completed two years of Chinese language training in consultation with the instructor.

Program Requirements (ASIAN-LL)

Last 4 Terms Offered (None)

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