Korea University Outreach Center for Korean Linguistic, Literary, and Cultural Studies

By looking at poems adorning Korean literary history through the lens of modern and contemporary Korean history, this course aims to enhance international interest in Korean studies in general and respond to academic demand. Learners taking this course will be able to view poetry, the essence of linguistic art, together with the historical reality during then and understand the relationship between society and literature and even the historical significance of culture and art. This course particularly covers historical events serving as turning points in modern and contemporary Korea history and the poems refecting such historical realities. From the March First Independence Movement to the Sinking of Sewŏl Ferry, 9 professors specializing in each theme will teach as a team and provide learners with the opportunity to vividly experience Korean poetry embedded in the dynamic modern and contemporary history of Korea.

This course examines writers and literary works important in the history of modern Korean novels to further encourage international interest in Korean history, Korean literature, and Korean studies in general as well as respond to increasing academic demand. By reading novels, we can encounter models of characters and lives lived during that time. The time and space settings of novels are the central axes forming their worlds, the stage against which the entire stories are set, and the conditions that enable the stories to occur. The novel is thus a form of linguistic art through which we can meet lives in their most vivid manifestations when the work was written. This course will provide an opportunity for learners to understand the historical time and space of major modern Korean novels and help them grow insight into Korean history, Korean novels, and history and novels as stories.

By selecting events that have occurred in Seoul and have been repeatedly covered in popular culture, this course aims to fill in overseas learners with background knowledge of these events. The course will present important events and spaces in the history of Seoul, examine how things were during the time of events, introduce literary works and culture produced at that time, and look at how popular culture today views those periods. Learners will be able to understand the circumstances during then as well as gain a perspective of how the past is viewed today. The course will also examine the current state of the spaces where past events have occurred and learn about the accumulation of temporality in certain spaces.

Many classical Korean novels particularly set their stories in times and spaces of China. While the reasons may be explained in many diferent ways, it is clear nevertheless that the people who enjoyed classical Korean novels perceived the Central Plains of China as a civilized space. East Asia also shares the common experience of going through hardships. Classical Korean novels contain the scars of East Asian wars as well as the will to overcome them. Because East Asia was a space that was close yet difficult to experience in person for those living in the Korean peninsula, sometimes the East Asian times and spaces in the novels were imagined. This course will examine how the times and spaces of East Asia were variously reproduced in classical Korean novels so that overseas learners wishing to learn about Korea will feel closer to Korean culture and further familiarize themselves with the traditional culture of Korea.

Records of pavilions in Korea date from the period of the Three Kingdoms. The number of pavilions rapidly increased during the Chosŏn dynasty, which is closely related to the culture among scholar-officials of leading secluded lives. These scholar-officials practiced self-cultivation and raised disciples on the one hand while also building pavilions and leisurely enjoying refned arts. The pavilions were mostly built in mountains or along rivers and lakes, where the view of the surrounding scenery was excellent. Pavilion culture, during which literary scholar-ofcials would get together and hold poetry gatherings, was formed, and many literary works including Pavilion Poems and Pavilion Essays were created. This course will look at the history and culture of the major pavilions based in Kangwŏn, Chŏlla, and Kyŏngsang Provinces. By focusing on the writers of classical Korean literature and their works, the course will provide an opportunity to understand the various aspects of Korean literature.

The Korean historical novel is a genre born uniquely from the tension between history and novels. From the early modern period to the current phenomenon of Hallyu, or the Korean Wave, Korean historical novels have breathed together with the times, seeking to understand the present and predict the future from the past. Their trajectory will serve as a useful guide for overseas learners of Korean studies who are interested in knowing more about Korean history and culture in general. By considering the dynamic aspect of Korean historical novels, this course will contribute to expanding the various interest in and basis of Korean studies. Together with the diversification of platforms and the mixing of media including films, OTT contents, webcomics, and cartoons, Korean historical novels have expanded their area and continue to evolve. The rich potential of Korean historical novels presented by this course will vitalize comparative studies between local areas and cultures and breathe life into the cultural assets of global contents.

This course aims to examine not only the standard Korean language but also the various forms of Korean depending on diverse factors such as region, class, and gender. The first half of the course will focus on grasping the definition of dialects, the origins, differentiation, and distribution of dialects, the methodology of the collection and research of dialects, as well as the characteristics of the dialects of each region in Korea. The second half of the course will cover the concept of social dialects, language policy, and the transformation of language by period, gender, and class. By taking this course, learners will be able comprehend the major concepts of the dialects of Korea, learn how they are used in real life, and gain a deeper understanding of the value Korean holds as language material.

This course takes a contrastive linguistics view to explore and understand the difference in phoneme, form, syntax, vocabulary, discourse, and speech-act between the Korean language and the Chinese language. Learners who speak Chinese and are aiming to learn Korean will be able to understand the linguistic difference between the two languages and acquire in-depth knowledge of the Korean language. Those who teach Korean as a foreign language will be able to understand the errors Chinese speakers make while learning Korean and formulate more informed and effective pedagogical methods that can meet the learners’ needs.

By taking this course, learners will be able to gain a detailed understanding of how the Korean language has transformed over history. Like all languages around the world, Korean has changed with history and continues to change in the present. This course will examine over a thousand-years-worth of material accumulated on the history of the Korean language to provide a better understanding of the transformations in Korean in general such as in phenomes, orthography, grammar, and vocabulary. Learners studying Korean will become equipped with sophisticated expertise in terms of the Korean language.

This course travels through Korean poetry written in classical Chinese against the backdrop of spaces where major events in Korean history took place. The course will guide learners to gain a more multifaceted understanding of the history of Korean poetry in classical Chinese within historical and spatial contexts. By examining key events in Korean history, the spaces such events took place, and the fgures involved, learners will be able to vividly perceive Korean poems written in classical Chinese as products of history and reality instead of what is merely conceptual.