He's a nice guy but has high expectations. There is maybe a lot of reading. I am enrolled and got this today:
Hello Everyone,
My name is Drew Richardson and I am your instructor for HIS39E: Monsters, Media, and the History of the Supernatural in Modern Japan. I am a PhD candidate in the department of history and this is the tail-end of my 6th year at UCSC. Because I am neither a professor nor have I finished my PhD -- one more year to go! -- please call me 'Drew.'
I hope you had a great end to the Spring quarter. While our summer class might seem far away now, I wanted to send out an e-mail to help you prepare.
1.) Summer Classes are Intense.
They move at twice the speed of a normal class, which means we will be spending 6 hours a week together across two sessions. I promise to make each class interesting for you but you should know that every single session covers one week's worth of content.
As a general rule, courses are designed so that students should be spending at 2-3 hours outside of class for each hour of instruction. For our class, that means you should expect at least 12-18 hours of reading/homework time per week, in addition to the 6 hours of class meetings. In total, you should expect that 18-24 hours of your week will be time for monsters.
2.) Readers Beware!
We are going to be reading/viewing some weird and wild stuff: encyclopedias of shapeshifters, obscure Victorian-era articles on sounds from deep beneath the earth, woodblock prints of gruesome executions, folktales of local hauntings, video game instruction manuals, contemporary monster manga, etc.
The reading requirements for this course, while profoundly interesting, are not lesser than any other history course. If this were a 10 week course, we would have approximately 100 pages of reading per week; however, we are taking this over a compressed schedule so you should expect almost 200 pages each week. (But I hope the reading will delight and entertain you!)
I also want to indicate here that the subject matter is often intense. We will be frequently engaging with horror and the grotesque. Many of our readings, manga, and films contain disturbing scenes of murder and sexual violence.
3.) Our Textbook!
I hope I haven't scared too many of you away. We have one required text for this class. (Everything else will be provided as .pdfs). We will be reading the entire book and it is a vital resource for the final essay, so I strongly recommend that everyone purchase it.
The text is Michael Dylan Foster's "The Book of Yokai: Mysterious Creatures of Japanese Folklore." (2015)
I promise you that it is a wonderful book. It is also modestly priced. While it normally retails for $29.95, it is currently on sale at Amazon for $18.29!
If you'd like to prepare for the course, I recommend purchasing the text and starting to read. Pages 3-73 are required reading before the first class.
If you have any questions or concerns about the class please send me an e-mail ([email protected]). This is the first time that we have a Japanese Monsters class at UCSC and I am looking forward to sharing some of research with you.
I hope you have a great summer and I will be in touch again next month with the full syllabus.
Sincerely, Drew