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

3.0 credits · Graduate

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)