Monsters in Korean Modernity

4.0 credits

This course examines the monster as the “collective nightmare,” as Robin Wood describes it. A monster is a social construction that reflects society’s anxieties about its political, social, and cultural conditions. The course complicates the notion of the monster beyond the trope of a lab experiment gone awry in science fiction. “Monsters in Korean Modernity” traces how Korea’s turbulent twentieth-century modernization, marked by colonialism, neo-imperialism, militarism, patriarchy, and rapid industrialization, manifests as monsters in popular media, both visually and narratively. The course explores Korea’s responses to gender, ideology, capitalism, and colonialism.