Mid-Term Paper: World of Korean - Past and Present

Mid-Term Paper (Paper #1) – Guidance and Suggested Topics
Guidance
* Please make our texts integral to your essay.  Use at least one film and one article from our syllabus.  Using outside sources (films and articles) is welcome when they help enrich your argument. 
* Don’t forget to attach a separate page of “Works Cited” (“References” or “Bibliography”).  Make sure that its format is in agreement with citation rules such as MLA style, Chicago Manuel style, or APA style. 
* The following topics are suggestions; you can work on your own topic if you think that it is relevant to our course.  Combining suggested topics is also another option, when you consider it to fit your concerns.
* Due by Oct. 27 (Friday) via CourseWeb
* Take another look at the essay policies and the grading criteria on the syllabus.
Suggested topics
1. The issue of national culture has continued to dominate modern Korean history.  Why has the question been vital to Korean society?  What makes many thinkers cautious of the issue?  You may want to work on, for instance, Shin Chae-ho’s minjok/minjung historiography (its historical significance and latent problems), Yi Kwang-su’s Mujŏng (focusing on the rise of the literature of enlightenment and its limits), the formation of a new and modern self or subjectivity in the cultural sphere of the colonial era (e.g., in relation to the rise of yeonae discourse in the early twentieth century), the Sopyonje phenomenon (how to understand modernized [Westernized] viewers’ fascination with outdated traditions of folk art), Cho Hae Joang’s analysis of the multifaceted nature of colonial mentality, and/or Fanon’s elaborations on what national culture is and why and how to invest in it.  
1.1. Why was rewriting Korean history vital to Shin Chae-ho?  How did he rewrite it?  In what sense is his historical view a significant break with pre-modern historiography?  What problems are inherent to his historical consciousness?  
1.2. One of the motifs that animate Yi Kwang-su’s Mujŏng is the tension between inside and outside, between outward and inward gazes, and between going overseas and looking for a culturally specific interiority (inner self or subjectivity).  What does the struggle between inside and outside suggest with regard to how to overcome colonial modernity?  How does the Yŏng-chae character become a catalyst for the struggle?       1.3. Sopyonje centers on the search for cultural identity.  When it was released in 1993, though, such terms as “global,” “transnational,” “transcultural,” “cosmopolitan,” “border-crossing,” and “hybrid” were already gaining wide currency not only within the academic circle, but also in everyday life as well to describe emergent forms of political, economic, and sociocultural interactions across borders.  One may then wonder what it means to look for local cultural roots in the era of transnational/transcultural imagination.  Was the film simply anachronistic?  How then could it become a huge appeal for South Korean audiences?  Can we say that the question of national culture is still very much relevant to our life today?  Then how is it so?  What pitfalls in the debates on national culture should we be cautious of?  
2. In an attempt to make sense of fundamental challenges that South Korea faces, scholars often look back on the Korean War.  According to scholars like Choi Jang-jip, Paik Nak-chung and Bruce Cumings, one of the issues central to understanding Korean society is the lack of an organic relation between the state and society, that is, a profound disjuncture between them (the cleavage between the state and civil society and the combination of vertical strength and lateral weakness).  How did the Korean War and national division shape Korean society as such?  What effects did the structural characteristics have over the formation of collective psyche in both Koreas?  The 1990s saw a significant sociopolitical change in South Korea.  What change did the transition bring to the public perception of national division and the formation of self-image?    
2.1. The trajectory of Myong-jun’s journey in The Square forms a process that he loses the square.  How is his loss of the square (or his continued failures to find/build a space of communication) involved with the sociopolitical milieu after national liberation?  Why does he continue to fail to develop other mindsets than a refugee sensibility in liberated Korea?  Why, for him, is the gulp between self and society hardly bridgeable?     
2.2. JSA strives to show how the division system is still casting heavy shadows on Koreans’ minds and social lives.  At the same time, it also crystallizes fresh approaches to the weighty political issue.  How does it articulate the ways in which national division still constitutes a major constitutive element in the formation of collective psyche in Korea today?  How, on the other hand, does it question and disrupt the division mentality constructed on the old paradigm of the Cold War antagonism?  What narrative and technical strategies does the film employ to pose challenges to the division system?
3. My Own Breathing urges us to reflect on why Korean society has been silent about the issue of comfort women. Many comfort women themselves have also remained reluctant or unable to speak about their sufferings. What has caused Korean society to suppress the memories of comfort women? Does the comfort women issue (their counter memories) need us to rethink official national history? How so? How does the film help comfort women find their voices? What stances does the film take to enable comfort women to break their silences?
4. Woman’s body has been a focal point in the formation of national identity.  Why and how?  Why is Song-hwa at the center of the search for cultural roots in Sopyonje?  How is the collective amnesia about comfort women, as explored in films like My Own Breathing, connected to the sanitization of national memories?