Instructions for response papers.

From time to time throughout the semester I will be assigning short response papers, basically a one-page response to one of the assigned texts.

What I will be looking for in these papers is:

1. evidence that you read the text: a brief summary (no longer than a sentence or two) of what the text is about, with some attention to who wrote it and why.
2. evidence that you thought about the text in relation to the art we are looking at in class that week (which means that you will need to look carefully at pictures in any other reading for the week; the Image Library on Blackboard may also have some that will be helpful). Your own response to the reading is important; it's why I'm calling this kind of assignment a response paper.
3. good writing.

Within these parameters, you can go in any direction you want with these papers. If the text makes you think about the nature of Asian religions or the politics of a specific period or contemporary Asian society, please write about it. I am hoping that these papers will stimulate your thinking about different uses of narrative in Asia and that this will deepen your understanding of Asian art. Please note, though, that I am not interested in thoughtless criticism of Asian art or culture. If the text is confusing or you have a strongly negative reaction to it, you need to stop to reflect on how the values of any society in a particular period might differ from modern American values, and try to understand the author’s reasons for writing as he or she did.

Please refer to the notes in your syllabus about appropriate formats for written work and about plagiarism. (Yes, plagiarism even matters here: if you quote from the text in your paper, please use a parenthetical reference.)

If you have further questions about writing response papers, you might visit the HWS Writes website.

Assignments.

1. Asvaghosha, "The Buddha-Karita," trans. E. B. Cowell, in The World of Literature, ed. Louise Westling et al. (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1999), 265-288, due Monday, Feb. 4.

2. “Rhyme-Prose on the Goddess of the Lo,” in Burton Watson, ed. and trans., The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry: From Early Times to the Thirteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 116-121, due Monday, Feb. 25.

3. “Preface to the Poem on the Peach Blossom Spring,” in Watson, ed. and trans., The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry, 142-143, due Monday, Mar. 3.

4. Karen L. Brock, “Chinese Maiden, Silla Monk: Zenmyō and her Thirteenth-Century Japanese Audience,” in Flowering in the Shadows: Women in the History of Chinese and Japanese Painting, ed. Marsha Weidner (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1990), 185-218, due Monday, Apr. 7 (concentrate on the translated passages of the story).

5. W. G. Archer, The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry (New York: Grove Press, 1960), 26-113, due Monday, Apr. 21 (concentrate on Chapters III and IV on the Bhagavata Purana, 26-71, or on Chapter V, “The Krishna of Poetry,” 72-92).