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(Course-related content will appear here in reverse chronological order: the newest things at the top of the page, and older posts toward the bottom.)

Pick Your Assignment!

Folks:I mixed up which assignment I’d given the class for the last assignment, and now there are two versions of the assignment floating around:

  1. Choose an interesting, dramatic scene from a film, and write the dialog exactly as it appears in the film. (You can use subtitles, but remember, subtitles usually simplify the dialog, so you need to check it against the spoken dialog.) Then, decide which actions to add to the text surrounding the reported speech — the words inside the quotation marks. You cannot write all of the actions, facial expressions, and sounds, so choose the important ones that should got into the scene.
  2. Take the dialog that you wrote for me earlier, and add actions, facial expressions, and attributions (he said, she shouted, they whispered) other supporting details to enrich the conversation.

If you have already done or started assignment #2, that’s fine, just finish it and hand it in, and you won’t need to do #1.But if you haven’t started either one, I prefer you do assignment #1. Remember, Youtube is a useful source and there are lots of short clips from films. You should choose a single scene, or part of a scene, for this exercise.ALSO: I forgot the other “assignment” I gave you last time — about flashbacks. That is, to look at a flashback in a short story or a book you liked, and try to explain how it works, what it is doing, and what it contributes to the story.  Since one student did it, I was reminded of that assignment. So don’t forget to do this one as well! That’s enough assignments for the semester!

Lectures of “Flappers” and “SF & The Western Mind”

Mediafire, the file hosting service where I uploaded the Flapper Lecture, is somehow suddenly down. So I’ve created an archive containing both of this weekend’s lectures: SF and the Western Mind, and Flappers, to one archive, on a more stable download page. You can get the archive here. As for the powerpoint of the Flapper lecture, it’s viewable here on Google Docs. However, it will play itself, so you might want to pause it an advance it as you listen to the lecture.There’s no slide presentation for the SF lecture, just the audio! Please have a listen to at least the Flapper lecture. I’ll say more about SF class on Tuesday, and take questions on both lectures. If you don’t listen to the SF lecture before Tuesday, please try listen to it before Thursday, as it’s relevant to the panel discussion happening that day.

Second Update — Feedback for the Marilyn Monroe Panel Discussion

Hi folks,

I just realized that I forgot to share with you the link to the feedback form for the most recent panel discussion. Here it is.  That lecture on SF is coming sometime on Sunday!

UPDATE: That Lecture on SF

My lecture on SF is coming, but I got busy and couldn’t finish preparing it in time (as of Saturday 6pm) and I have an appointment soon, so I’ll get it online sometime in the next 24 hours or so… probably late tonight, but possibly tomorrow morning. Worst-case scenario, you’ll find it by 6pm Sunday evening, but probably much sooner than that. I’ll add it to this post when it’s ready!

More on Yehyun’s Proposal Topic

I’m pretty sure I promised two links for you in relation to Yehyun’s discussion. One of them was on how Korea ended up dependent on ActiveX controls for its online commerce. That story is very clearly explained — and accurate, as far as I’ve discovered –  on this page.

Here’s more information (from about a year ago) on attempts to make ActiveX work in Google’s new(ish) browser, Chrome… specifically so Koreans can use it. There’s also information on a Professor named Kichang Kim who’s trying to force the Korean government to catch up with the standards and protocols of the rest of the planet’s internet. And here’s an entry about Korea’s continuing dependency on IE6, on a blog all about IT and the web in Korea — and its relationship with the rest of the internet.

On a  tangent, but it’s an interesting one, Brian Deutsch blogged here about what happened when the Korean government  created a website “for foreigners” but followed the very limited and behind-the-times web standards (IE6, Windows only, etc.) common to Korea. And here’s an interesting report about how the Internet developed in Korea in the first place!

I can’t recall what the other topic I promised to give you links about was, but I’ll offer this one to you: Manybooks.net is a website where, at the present moment, over 27,000 ebooks can be gotten for free — legally, because they have been released under a Creative Commons License, or are in the Public Domain.

By the way, Manybooks.net is far from the only site like this. Project Gutenbeg probably started the whole trend — digitizing books in the Public Domain — and now there are many similar sites offering eBooks in many formats for free.

For example, a book by another Gordon Sellar is available on Manybooks.net. It’s from the 1800s and, no, I don’t think he and I are related (though you never know).  In any case, the book is available in a wide variety of standardized formats — 20 of them, if you include a few specific version of PDF. This website gives these books away. If this is possible, I’m sure Korean eBook publishing needn’t require the development of a whole new eBook format. At most, it might take some modification of an existing format to display Korean text properly.

Manybooks and and other sources of free reading material are likely to be important to the development of the eBook hardware business, just as Napster and other file-sharing services that facilitated illegal MP3 downloading were important for the development of the MP3 player business.

So… perhaps what Koreans need to do to get an eBook business started is to start a few websites where free eBooks (in the public domain) are encoded and offered in standardized formats… and make those formats so popular that, finally, eBook hardware makers will have to simply include those formats among the ones readable by their hardware?

If they don’t, then alternative software will be developed and made cheaply or freely available in the iTunes App Store, allowing people to skip buying the Korean eBook reader hardware and opt for something a little more open-standards based.

In other words, by stalling, Korean book companies may well be damaging or even destroying their chances of developing a dedicated eBook hardware market… and even destroying the chances of a legal eBook trade in Korea for the foreseeable future!

See below for the revised course schedule, which I just posted earlier today! (Including the film we’ll be discussing in class on Tuesday!)

Schedule Update:

Hi folks. To be very, very clear, here’s our schedule for the next two weeks:

Tuesday, June 1 (morning): Class discussion of The Boiler Room and the current American financial crisis.

Preparation:

Tuesday, 1 June (7-9pm, IH 340): Make-up class: Hanmoi and Min Kyo will present their midterm papers.

Preparation:

Thursday, 3 June: Mijung will present her midterm paper to the class.

Preparation:

Tuesday, 8 June: Hyelim will present her paper in the first hour; we will begin our wrap-up discussion in the second hour.

Hyelim’s Presentation Preparation:

Download her essay from our Google Docs folder and read it over.

Wrap-up Discussion Preparation:

Thursday 10 June: Final Class

Our Insane Schedule

Folks,

Before I get into our schedule: we’ve lost a student, and predictably, he was scheduled to participate in the last panel discussion, which only had three people to begin with. I’m looking for a volunteer to take part in that last panel discussion and talk about comic book superheroes for fifty minutes. If nobody volunteers by the time our next class rolls around, one of you will be chosen randomly. (But volunteering will be good for your participation mark.) First person to volunteer gets the job!

EDIT: The empty slot has been filled. No more need for volunteers for our final panel discussion, though if you are dying to talk about superheroes, I will accept one more person for that final panel discussion!

Now, our schedule: Organizing make-up classes for a group of our size is hell, so I’m going to go with the MP3 lecture method. That means we can do two things: cover more material while still allowing class discussion of the lectures and reading material, and cover that material outside class without all having to be together.

In the light of that, Tuesday will be devoted to two things: discussion of the Flapper Lecture I posted, and the lecture on SF and its influence on the Western mind that I’ll post sometime later today.

Tuesday’s class (1 June) will be purely discussion of these lectures. Please listen to them before class, and take notes, and come to class with any questions you might have.

For Thursday, 3 June, we’ll have a panel discussion on the idea of “SF as a foreign language.”

The idea of this discussion is the question of whether SF is specifically, culturally, American — a notion Thomas Disch has argued in parts of his book The Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of. SF is much less popular in Korea than in the Western world, especially the English-speaking world. Are the reasons for this cultural? What cultural differences do we see expressed in the structures, ideology, and discourses that form the basis of American SF? What facets of Invasion of the Body Snatchers are specifically American? How non-American (specifically French) is The Fifth Element? In your own cultures (this discussion this day includes Chinese, Russian, and Korean students — and SF is far more developed and accepted in Russia and China than in Korea, according to scholars), do you feel the local form of SF is influenced by American SF, or developed independently? How different is it from American SF?

Preparations:

Participants:

On Tuesday, June 8th, we’ll have a discussion for the first hour, regarding another MP3 lecture I’ll be uploading during the week before, dealing with the connection between Hippie and Beat culture, and their place within American culture generally.

The second half of class on June 8th will be another Panel Discussion: Does Korea “Need� a Beat or Hippie Generation?

Commentators on the differences between Korean and American culture sometimes compare Korea to America in the 1950s in terms of the stresses forming between youth culture and “adult” culture, but also because of specific cultural factors present in Korea, and because of an assumption about how cultures change. Commentators who make such comparisons tend to believe that Korea “needs”– for various reasons — to undergo the kinds of changes that occurred in America in the 1950s. This is, of course, a very American perspective, but the questions it raises are interesting: Do cultures, as they modernize, pass through the same kinds of stages? Were the changes that the beats and hippies introduced into American culture wholly positive? Is such a thing as a beat or hippie generation even possible in Korea at the present time? Will such a thing — and such social changes — ever be possible in Korea? Why or why not? And if so, is this a desirable change?

Preparations:

Participants:

Finally, our last Panel Discussion, on Thursday, 10 June, will be done without a lecture. Instead, I will provide you with some reading that promises to be better than my lecture would be in any case! The title of the Panel Discussion is  Heroism and Other Discourses from the World of Comic Books:

The idea of heroism is one which is probably present in some form or other in every society. However,  the notion of super-heroism as we see in comics and, increasingly in recent years, in film is somewhat different. While it’s possible to argue that Gilgamesh or Hong Gildong were superhero-like figures — and indeed, a lot of the propaganda in North Korea presents Kim Il-Sung in ways that are strangely similar to superhero comics — the superhero trope is, in some ways, a distinctly American creation. Several changes have occurred in the idea of superheroes, however: one of the most profound is the “secularization” of the superhero. Early on, superheroes normally had super-powers, with Superman being the best — but far from the only — example.

Batman was one of the first superheroes to become vastly popular without super-powers — only gadgets, intelligence, and passion for justice. Now, this kind of superhero is growing more and more popular in the mainstream, from The Watchmen to Iron Man and even Kick-Ass. What tropes, discourses, and anxieties do we see in Superhero narratives of  both types, and what do they reveal about American society and culture?

Preparations:

Participants:

The Flapper (MP3 Lecture & PPT)

Here, as promised, are links for downloading the Flapper lecture, and Powerpoint:

I’ll be adding a lecture sometime this weekend on “How SF Changed the Western Mind.” I’d appreciate it if you would check back for it, and listen to it for next week, along with the readings I’ve assigned you.

I’ll also be rearranging our panel discussions schedule, so do check back. I’ll add notes for each, to suggest possible areas of exploration, but as usual you are free to do what you like with the discussion: take it in directions I didn’t suggest, find other ways of talking about it, and so on.

Update

Hi folks,Here’s what’s going on:

We’ll be doing critiques on new articles starting from our next class, so if yours  isn’t at least started, if not drafted by now, get to work!I hope you’re enjoying the festival!

Critiques

Folks,Sorry to say this, but I’m still working my way through your stories. Reading fiction is a lot slower and more consuming than reading essays! I am hoping to have my feedback ready for you by the beginning of next week!Which reminds me: we will be having classes Monday and Wednesday next week. I don’t think anyone has volunteered for a critique on Monday, so I’ll give you a talk, but on Wednesday, we’ll need two people who want their work critiqued. If you want to volunteer, please email me before uploading a story!

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