Korean Literature Association

The Syllabi Archive

The KLA syllabus bank provides recent course syllabi taught by Korean literature or cultural studies professors in English, using primarily translated sources. The courses offer a historical survey of Korean literature or explore its interconnectedness with other historical, cultural, or aesthetic phenomena. The short description also underscores noteworthy features of the syllabus, related teaching resources, and innovative or non-traditional assignment prompts.

[Compiled on Jun. 08, 2023]

Ksenia Chizhova, “Korean Travel Narratives 700s-1940s” (taught at Princeton)

Explores civilization, empire, East-West encounters, and postcolonial homelessness.
Travelogues as epistemic coordinates that produce knowledge about the self and the other.
Korea provides us with a concrete vantage point upon the larger world.

Jae Won Edward Chung, “Imagining Disaster: Korea and the Apocalyptic Modern” (taught at Rutgers-New Brunswick)

Understanding Korea’s colonial modernity and its afterlives through an apocalyptic framework.
Explores genres of storytelling involving monsters, aliens, zombies, earthquakes, quarantine, and societal collapse.
How representation of calamity functions as allegories for remapping our past, present, and future.
Includes an expanded reading list of Asian and non-Asian studies scholarship.

Kyunghee Eo, “Modern Korean Literature in English Translation” (taught at CU Boulder)

Understanding modern Korean literature through romantic love, family, and the state.
Combines literary texts with cultural criticism and literary theories.
Brings together colonial period and Cold War era literature with the Asian American memoir (e.g. Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H Mart) and popular South Korean contemporary literature (e.g. Sang Young Park’s “The Tears of an Unknown Artist, or Zaytun Pasta.”)

Susan Hwang, “Culture of Protest in South Korea” (taught at UC Santa Barbara)

Understanding literature’s efficacy as a tool of political protest within a broader field of cultural media (e.g. songs, films, digital media).
Explores the relationship between technological development and the proliferation of protest practices.
Explores themes of censorship, solidarity, collectivity, gender, difference, and performance.
From the Tonghak Uprising to the Flash Mob.

I Jonathan Kief, “Transnational Korea: Literature, Film, Popular Culture” (taught at UNC Chapel Hill)

How Korean cultural producers have used narratives of travel, migration, and exchange across borders to refashion the bounds of Korean identity.
Draws upon literary texts, films, and television shows.
From Memorabilia of the Three Kingdoms to Infinite Challenge, but with a thematic (rather than a strictly chronological) organization.
Includes assorted non-traditional assignment prompts, such as script writing and 3D-printing projects.

Immanuel Kim, “Modern Korean Literature in Translation” (taught at George Washington University)

Covers major literary trends in style and content for each decade of the 20th century, selected for topical significance, literary merit, and diversity of subject matter.
Provides in-depth coverage of North Korean literature and culture, especially through the notion of the hidden hero in the novel Friend.
Teaches how to combine the analysis of primary sources, scholarly literature, and theory.

John H. Kim, “Madness in Korean Literature and Film” (taught at Bowdoin College)

Explores the significance of madness within the history of modern Korean fiction, poetry, and film.
Asks how the representation of madness illuminates the problems of history and memory, language and representation, gender and sexuality, and global capitalism.
Incorporates controversial contemporary works, such as The Vegetarian, Mina, At Least We Can Apologize, and The Accusation.

Jenny Wang Medina, “Modern Korean Literature in Translation: Multiple Koreas, Multiple Voices” (taught at Emory)

Explores Korean literature by centering writers around the world who self-identify as Korean.
Examines narratives for their invocation of notions of a territory, a unified space, or a collective community.
Approaches the transmission and reception of literary texts in terms of soft power and transnational cultural exchange.
Combines analysis of canonical works with contemporary fiction from North Korea, South Korea, and the United States.

Si Nae Park, “Korean Literature in Translation” (taught at Harvard)

Does not move chronologically and mixes readings from premodern and modern times.
Encourages reading aloud.
Includes innovative assignment prompts, including creative writing, historical co(n)textualization, anthology compilation with cover art, a critical reflection on translated literature, and a think piece called “a literary problem”
Invites speaker to address literary translation or literary translator in action and makes field trips to the Harvard-Yenching Library’s rare book reading room, the Harvard Art Museums, and the Harvard Map Collections.

Kevin Michael Smith, “Science Fiction in East Asia” (taught at UC Berkeley)

Situates modern Korean literature within a generic imaginary of SF.
Understanding SF as “realism for the 21st century,” especially within the context of East Asian culture and society.
Explores how SF defamiliarizes and reevaluates present global issues, bioethics, the military-industrial complex, techno-Orientalism, the global technology market, and the culture industry.
Surveys major and emerging SF authors from China, Japan, Taiwan, and Korea.

Miya Qiong Xie “Modern Korean Literature in A Global Context” (taught at Dartmouth)

Links modern Korean literature to Korean Wave media forms, Korean diasporic works coming out of Japan, the United States, and China.
The course problematizes difficult issues of modern Korean history, such as colonial modernity, the US occupation and national division, and overseas Korean identity.
Includes a video project assignment prompt.
Includes a short video list accompanying course readings.

Ivanna Sang Een Yi, “Korean Literature and Performance: from P’ansori to K-pop” (taught at Cornell)

Examines Korean literature and performance traditions from the Chosŏn dynasty to the present.
Through performance workshops, the course enables students to experience how Korean epic and lyric traditions were performed in the past and how they continue to flourish in the present across various media, including recorded music, written texts, and film.
Brings together Korean poetry, fiction, cinema, and popular music, while privileging performance over textuality.
Includes a group performance prompt and an original poetry portfolio prompt.

If you’d like to submit your syllabus for sharing, please contact Jae Won Chung at jchung@alc.rutgers.edu

Korean Studies Institutes & Centers with Video Content

Institute of Korean Studies at George Washington University

Institute of Korean Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington

Korea Institute at Harvard University

Korean Treasures at Harvard University

Korean Studies Institute at the University of Southern California

Nam Center of Korean Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Newspapers, channels, podcasts, blogs

Major Dailies in South Korea

Rodong Sinmun: the official newspaper of North Korea’s Central Committee of the Worker’s Party of North Korea

Words without Borders: contains a number of Korean works in translation, along with essays from translators.

Asymptote: Taiwan-based online magazine dedicated to translations of world literature, including poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and drama, mostly to English. Contains interesting coverage of contemporary Korean literature.

Korean Classic Film Channel on YouTube, an actively curated and updated archive of streamable Korean films (over a hundred titles available).

Koreanfilm.org: one of the first English-language websites to offer a comprehensive evaluation of contemporary South Korean cinema. Begun by Darcy Paquet, the subtitlest of the Oscar-winning film Parasite back in 1999. It also offers a useful and updated guide to scholarly books on Korean cinema.

KLWave: Short for Korean Literature Wave, the site serves as a centralized platform for supporting the translation, publication, and exchange of Korean literature around the world. The site contains a database of translated works and their translators, categorized by genre or format. Also features publisher’s picks, published English-language reviews, and information about grants.

Korean Literature Now: a literary magazine published by the Literature Translation Institute of Korea, a government-funded organization. A good resource for research on contemporary literature.

North Korean Literature in English: a literature blog run by a Fulbright grantee.

Korea Now Podcast: a podcast boasting a wide range of expert and scholar guests, discussing Korean politics, society, and culture. Summer 2020 episodes contain a series on Korean literature.

Korea Society: a New York-based organization, which hosts events covering issues of international affairs, politics, society, and culture. The site contains a wealth of streamable talks and lectures on an array of topics.

Korea-related blogs

Brother Anthony of Taize’s Korean Studies links: a trove of links to Korea-related cultural material, spanning art, literature, music, and tea. This particular section of his page offers an excellent compilation of links for research, translation, and cultural background.

Digital NK is a database of digital content related to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. The archive indexes - among others - books, newspapers, magazines, and visual media in all languages. All documents are freely accessible.

The Grand Narrative: Blog on Korean feminism, sexuality, and popular culture.

K Lit Reads: An engaging blog devoted to contemporary Korean literature broadly imagined, including graphic novels, webtoons, memoirs, thrillers, and poetry.

London Korean Links: Provides Korea-related cultural events based in London and reviews of recent books on Korea that cover history, politics, religion, pop culture, and more.

These resources will be periodically updated. If you would like to submit suggestions for consideration by the KLA executive committee, please contact jchung@alc.rutgers.edu. Please understand that for various reasons we may not be able to fulfill every request.

Banner Image: Courtesy of the National Museum of Korea