EALCTalks! Spring 2022

Kevin Michael Smith, "A Tune of Two Cities: Seoul, Tokyo, and the Tonality of Comparison"

  This presentation tunes in to interwar Korean and Japanese popular music’s affective transposability through the exceptional textual and melodic identity between Fujiyama Ichirō’s 1936 hit "Tokyo Rhapsody" and Kim Hae-song’s 1938 adaptation "Flowery Seoul" to unpack the tonal contours of what Nayoung Aimee Kwon calls “intimate empire,” exploring how the exchange between these two jubilant city-songs belies a more profound assimilation of Korean self-identification into the transregional logic of the greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. 

Friday, February 25, noon to 1pm, 287 Dwinelle Hall 

Yvonne Lin, “Quiet ruination: the aesthetics of half-life in Li Yang's 404 Not Found” 

This talk examines 404 Not Found (2019), a collection of photographs taken by Li Yang to document the place where he grew up, a since-abandoned nuclear town in Gansu coded as “404.” I argue that these images, through an aesthetics of banality and nuclear ruin, probe the limits of representation—disclosing the violence of obsolescence—as the PRC transitioned from a Cold War period into the postsocialist era. 

Friday, March 4, noon to 1pm, 287 Dwinelle Hall 

Kyongmi Park, “Language Teaching in a Post-Pandemic Future: Using Lessons from Covid for Hybrid Class Redesign”

 The move to 100% remote instruction following the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic has shifted attitudes towards both online and hybrid instruction among instructors and students. As we emerge from the pandemic and look towards the future, there are important lessons to be drawn about what has worked well, what challenges we have faced, and where we can go from here to make language learning both more accessible and more effective. Drawing on student survey data collected over six semesters as well as an analysis of learning outcomes comparing pre-pandemic benchmarks with outcomes from fully online and hybrid classes, this presentation will offer initial thoughts on how to incorporate lessons from the past two years into planning for the future. 

Friday April 15, 4pm to 5pm

Bonnie McClure, “Gestures of Grieving in Man'yōshū and Beyond”

 This talk will briefly trace the evolution of bodily affects of grief in premodern Japanese literature, beginning with death scenes and funeral poems from 8th-century works Kojiki, Izumo fudoki, and Man'yōshū. In these early examples I locate structures of narrating affect and feeling that at first are specifically tied to mourning but that subsequently, in poems from the latter periods of Man'yōshū and in various works from ensuing eras, reappear in other contexts, including stories of abandonment and unrequited love.

 Friday, April 29, noon-1pm, 287 Dwinelle Hall 

Ashley Sangyou Kim, “Remembering the Gwangju Democratic Movement through Photographs”

The Gwangju Democratic Movement (May 18 to May 27,1980) was a pivotal moment in South Korea's democratization. The military dictatorship's brutal crackdown and Gwangju's organized response left photographs that pose many questions, and this talk will go through some of those images to discuss how they reveal, hide, complicate, or distort this historic event. I will also discuss some of the context behind the photographs, such as who took each photograph and how it survived the military's censorship.

  Friday, May 6, noon-1pm, 287 Dwinelle Hall