Fall 2010
Wednesday 3:30-6:20
Jieun Chang (jieun.chang@usc.edu)
EALC 499 Special Topics:
History and Memory in Modern Korea
This course probes the margins or underside of modern Korean history through examining the representation of individual and collective traumas in historical and literary texts and visual media. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach that draws upon history, literature, film, anthropology, philosophy and cultural studies, the course tries to uncover or to split open the voices of the marginalized, the trivialized and the drowned while seeking to unfold the meanings (or political values) of marginalization in relation to the cultural establishment of modern Korea. What we seek to recover, however, occupies no separate and legible sites of commemoration; there is often no simple way to break the silence. We will pay particular attention to this difficulty or risk inherent in the thinking or writing of the “subaltern” subjects and explore further the archaeology of that silence. The course requires no preliminary knowledge of the Korean history or language.
