KORE20002: Contemporary Korea

• Proposal (10%)
• Mid-term Paper (30%)
• Oral presentation (20%)
• Final Paper (40%)

Note: there is a hurdle via the 80% tutorial participation rate, meaning you can miss up to 2 tutorials without special consideration explaining your absence.

The first assignment, a research proposal (10%) is pretty easy and not too bad. You'll need to declare what topic (out of the 12 possible covered) you want to write your paper on, and explain the structure, and include references with some analysis of the references themselves (e.g. was it a Korean anthropologist that wrote this reference? Or did you pick an American psychologist instead? Justify why you did so etc.) This isn't too hard and you can always book a consultation to either Jay or the head-tutor.

The oral presentation (20%) requires you to do an oral presentation on a topic which is NOT the topic you chose to write your proposal on. This could be done in week 4 or week 12, with the week 12 list of prompts being released in week 9. During this semester, we had to record a PowerPoint/slides presentation and upload the presentation as a video with audio. With that being said, for 2022 (hopefully!), this will be done in tutorials in person. Not hard but I did mess up here a little bit.

The mid-term essay (30%) essentially is a first draft of your paper. I was quite confused at what they wanted from us, but again, going to a consultation does solve this issue. The final essay (40%) is what it is - a 3000 word essay that you spend the semester working on. Now, if you are smart, you would have done what I just said, and not instead, write 3000 words on the day before the due date. Now who would do such a thing...but in all seriousness, this felt very satisfying to finish and seeing the culmination of your hard-core research into a neat 3000 word essay is amazing! While you do get a sample of previous essays (2017), they are not done in the same format as done these days so don't copy it I suppose. Just a quick tip for my non-arts peeps: use high quality references. A random reference from a dodgy publication won't suffice (cough cough OB) here!

I took this subject as a breadth (commerce), given my interests in Korean culture prior to this subject. The tl;dr here is only do it if you actually enjoy writing essays and like doing readings, since hallyu is only one topic in this subject!

Brilliant subject, and has actually made me think of doing an arts masters lol, or even an arts degree. We'll see, but I think I have a new passion for anthropology now lol...or maybe I'm just a koreaboo (lol after writing this all up, I just realised my atarnotes username and profile picture...lol)...who knows...anyways this subject is ran extremely well, and the content is very interesting and the assessments help build knowledge on a topic you (should) be passionate about! Thanks for reading and I think expect further arts breadth reviews!

Yes, with screen capture. Lectures were delivered live, then uploaded later onto Canvas.

Jay Song & Andrew Eungi Kim (Andrew took the first 6 weeks, but Jay is the subject co-ordinator and the marker of the final paper)

This subject delves into contemporary Korean history and society (i.e. subject does as advertised). This means you'll explore Korea as a nation from the 1950s (Korean War) to modern day Korea. There is some analysis of the two Koreas, but it is largely focused on South Korea (referred to as Korea from here on). As this is an arts subject, you will be expected to complete readings to enhance the lectures, since they are mostly a shallow dive of each topic. Jay mentioned a few times that this subject was merely a glance at contemporary Korea, focusing on breadth rather than depth of the topics. This means you don't need to have a good knowledge of Korean society to appreciate much of the subject!

Let's talk about content. In twelve weeks, you'll learn about:
Week 1 - Introduction to Korean Culture (A)

N/A (final essay subject, BUT there were samples of final essays from previous years. Read more below.)

None (you don't need a prior knowledge of Korean...just English...)

4.6/5

On Handbook it says the lecturer's upcoming text, but given it is an arts subject you'll receive weekly readings - some compulsory, some optional. Otherwise no large encompassing textbook.

This subject was held entirely online unfortunately, owing to the COVID-19 related lockdowns in Melbourne. However, the people in my class were really good and always willing to talk about the week's content in the discussions. This is very refreshing when compared to commerce tutorials...lol. Anna was the lone tutor for this subject who did a similar subject a few years ago, and definitely made the tutorials a lot more fun and engaging. Probably my favourite part of the subject. As mentioned before, you'll need to attend at least 10 of the 12 tutorials (there's a tutorial week 1) to pass the subject. Special consideration can be applied for if you were sick for a week, but I'd ask Jay about this whenever you run into such an issue. These tutorials could sometimes turn into QnA sessions whenever an assessment was due soon, but other than that no complaints.

1x 2 hr lecture, 1x 1 hr tutorial per week

2021 Semester 2 (online)

H2A