Tag: popculture

Cosplay’d

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Bizarre photo, I know. Miss Jiwaku suggested I pose with these two, probably because she found it amusing to see Koreans dressed this way; we were both quite surprised to see a costume like the woman on the left is wearing being used at all in Seoul, much less for a commercial property,on a Friday afternoon, in a mall. Cosplay is not a common thing in Korea — at least, not if you mean cosplay as in the costumes associated with manga or other superhero/SF/fantasy stuff. I’ve only seen it a couple of times, and this, the second time, it …

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Why I Think Korea’s “Not Really Confucian” (And That Saying It Is Doesn’t Help Things…)

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UPDATE (20 min after posting): Okay, the title of this post is probably a cheat for something much more complex I’m trying to say. This is a blog. Sue me. ORIGINAL POST: Today a student dropped by my office to discuss an academic project she’s working on, and we got into a discussion of whether we can lay blame for various patriarchal ills in modern Korea at the feet of Confucianism. During this discussion, I confessed that I don’t think we can. Or, rather, that I think blaming Confucianism is, like blaming Christianity, simply a lazy shorthand. This is not …

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More Random Pop Culture Stuff

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The more times I teach this American Pop Culture course, the more I begin to find other ways it could be taught. One way I’m thinking is that I could simply take seminal films — The Godfather,  Annie, Tootsie, Do the Right Thing, King Kong — and then explore all the various cultural dimensions that wouldn’t be apparent to students coming at them from outside Western culture. But I like the way I’m teaching it now, with lots of readings and so on. I have a very interesting observation on one of the books I’m reading for the course, but …

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Stuff of Interest (From Papers I’m Grading)

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While grading essays, I always encounter things that are interesting. I’ve decided to make note of a few of them, for a record if nothing else. In my English & American Popular Culture course, we’ve been focused on early-20th century American pop culture, but the students have written essays about late-20th century pop culture.  (This is a way of giving them a chance to attack issues we haven’t discussed, as well as  a way of giving them more time to research what they want to discuss in their final papers.) Anyway, some of the interesting moments, ideas, and thoughts that …

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The Power of Pride: Stylemakers and Rule Breakers of the Harlem Renaissance by Carole Marks and Diana Edkins

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This is a book I purchased a while back in the hopes of writing some SF set during the Harlem Renaissance, but which came in handy for my course Understanding English and American Popular Culture. (The first half of which has been pretty much devoted to African-Americans’ role in building the foundation of American popular culture.) The strength of the book is that it builds up a picture — and one that is honestly critical without stooping to being demeaning — of the world in which the Harlem Renaissance occurred, and a number of the major figures of the Renaissance. …

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