The Western Encounter with Early China

Catalog description

4 points, seminar. First offered spring 2016, and every other year thereafter. Prerequisite: Ideally, it should follow the departmentally required Cultures & Contexts course. This class will attempt to trace the development of the field traditionally known as “Sinology” in the West. We will study a range of East-West encounters, including the accounts of European explorers beginning with Marco Polo, the pioneering translations of scholarly missionaries, and the academic contributions of European and American linguists and historians. Through reading the scholarship of earlier generations, students can expect to acquire basic familiarity with the Chinese classics, but the focus of the course will be on historiography. In addition to common reading assignments, students will be asked to write three short papers and give in‐class presentations on the work of particular Sinologists.