ASIA 72 First-Year Seminar: Transnational Korea: Literature, Film, and Popular Culture

Taking the contemporary Korean Wave phenomenon as its point of departure, this first-year seminar introduces students to the history of transnational imaginations in twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Korean culture. Drawing upon literary texts, films, television shows, and relevant works of secondary scholarship, we will consider the variety of ways in which Korean cultural producers have used narratives of transnational travel, migration, and exchange in order to rethink Korean identity and Korea’s place in the world. In so doing, we will learn to think critically about the relationship between works from colonial Korea, postcolonial North Korea, postcolonial South Korea, and the Korean diaspora, and we will also gain a more nuanced understanding of the manifold ways in which popular culture interacts and intersects with more elite forms of representation and imagination. No knowledge of Korean is required. LA, BN, CI