In the past decade, Korean dramas have grown from a domestic industry, to East Asian cultural industry, to a global phenomenon. Audiences the world over, it seems, have “drama fever.” Together with other global media products, Korean and East Asian television programs are coming to define a new digital age in which serial streaming reins supreme. But spectacularly popular serialization is nothing new in East Asian cultural history! The advent of print capitalism in East Asia the late 19th and early 20th century provided the first platforms for modern serialized narratives that mediated the shock of the new for their readers. In the 50s, 60s, and 70s, serialized martial arts and adventure stories and comics provided vicarious spaces for working out the Cold War conflict. And with the advent of digital media in recent decades, serialized internet novels, webtoons, and television dramas have invaded even the sleep of modern consumers.
In this course, we will trace the media ecologies of these three historical landscapes to understand how new technologies, ideology, and popular culture come together across these different genres of serial texts from various East Asian cultures. We will peruse the print archives at Berkeley’s East Asian Library, explore digital spaces of serialization, and learn together how to critically read the narratives that consume our daily lives. Through frequent in-class writing and visual analysis, students will develop skills that will allow them to produce close readings of literary and visual objects. We will also read historical and theoretical texts to understand the context in which these images were made, and how scholars and theorists build arguments based on evidence. Taken together, the skills we accrue throughout the semester will allow students to produce a sophisticated 10-12 page final research paper about the stakes of serialization in modern East Asian popular culture.