ASIAN 2256 Digital Korea: Korean Modernity and Popular Culture

Course description

Over the last two decades, the thriving media and popular culture scene in East Asia has expanded to the point of influencing Western cultures. Particularly, South Korea has turned from a country importing Western cultures to a nation producing its own cultures and circulating them in an increasingly globalized context. The meteoric rise of Korean popular culture is a soaring cultural phenomenon known at Hallyu or the Korean Wave. However, the monolithic view of Hallyu as a cultural production is now being reconstituted from different viewpoints, including perspectives that deal with creative cultural participation on the part of audiences and the perspective of state promotion of Korean soft power. This course offers an overview of the current movement toward the modern social media environment and practices today, and it examines historical and theoretical approaches to Korean sociocultural issues about modernity and the formation of Korean popular culture. Topics of discussion include: the media and modernity, convergence cultures and platformization, webtoons and transmedia storytelling, mukbang and gender politics, social and national identity, and so on.

Previously offered classes