EALC Seminar: Screening East Asia: From Scroll Painting to Haptic Interface

This course introduces students to East Asian media cultures by focusing on a specific topic - the "screen." Students will explore how screen is not only an architectural construct (the painted screen) or a projection surface, but an electronic display, interface, or game console. Through examining a selection of scroll paintings, films, and digital artworks in Japan, South Korea, China, and Taiwan, they will learn to be attentive to the material, infrastructural, and formal conditions of how mass media is produced, exhibited, and consumed. Other media objects and phenomena to be discussed include manga and anime, console games, advertising walls, immersive installations, TikTok/Douyin short videos, digital filters and selfies, touch-based interfaces, among others. The class will also scrutinize the employment of the screen as motifs and metaphors in East Asian visual cultures and discuss how these metaphors and motifs negotiate questions of national identity, race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, socialism/post-socialism, colonialism/post-colonialism, global expansion of capitalism. This class will also offer students a chance to explore multimedia productions as a new mode of critical thinking and creative expression. This course is primarily for sophomores and juniors with a major or minor in the Department of East Asian Languages & Cultures. Other students may enroll with permission. No prior knowledge of East Asia is required.

Course Attributes: EN H; BU Hum; BU Eth; BU IS; AS HUM; AS LCD; FA HUM; AR HUM

EALC Seminar: Screening East Asia: From Scroll Painting to Haptic Interface

FILM AND MEDIA STUDIES 3900

Section A

Section 01