Introduction to East Asian Popular Culture

Catalog description

What can popular culture teach us about a society’s values, aesthetics, and historical legacies? In this course, we explore the cultural landscapes of China, Japan, and South Korea through the lens of film, television, music, anime, and digital media. Rather than treating pop culture as mere entertainment, we will approach it as a set of expressive forms that reveal deeper questions about tradition and modernity, identity and nation, gender and power. Through close reading, visual analysis, and contextual interpretation, Students will critically engage with cultural texts - such as Korean dramas, Japanese anime, Chinese historical epics, and short-form video platforms like Douyin. We will examine how these artifacts draw on long-standing cultural conventions while responding to new global currents. Through this work, students will gain an appreciation for the complexity of East Asian cultural production and develop interpretive skills central to the humanities.