KREN- 2112: Modern Korean Literature

Course Description: This course examines the constraints and imaginative possibilities of borders (and border crossing) in modern Korean literature with a sustained focus on how borders are produced through power: empire, the state, markets, social hierarchies, and academic disciplines and institutions. We ask how “Korean literature” has been defined and institutionalized as a field, and how writers’ formal strategies (content, form, voice, and language) have challenged that naturalized frame. Reading major and lesser-known works alongside scholarship in Korean Studies, diaspora studies, and decolonial/critical theory, we analyze how cultural texts construct, contest, and reimagine community: who gets bordered in/out, who becomes legible as a subject, and what forms of belonging (or refusal) literature makes possible. The course emphasizes the historical legacies of inequality—including colonialism/imperialism, Cold War orders, labor migration, racial capitalism, and gendered violence—and traces their contemporary afterlives in narratives of displacement, minoritized identities, and multilingual life. Across Korea, East Asia, and wider global routes, we practice comparative reading to track how cultural texts make the unspeakable legible, resist erasure, and reimagine belonging. All readings are in English; no Korean language skills or previous knowledge of Korean history are assumed.