2016-17 Academic Catalog

What is news? How do rumors and gossips shape news in modern China, Japan, and Korea? Is the press one of the sociocultural bases within civil society that shapes opinion in the public sphere in East Asia? Students will examine how press-like activities reshape oral communication networks and printing culture and isolate how the public is redefined in times of war and revolutions. Drawing sources from a combination of poems, private letters, maps, pamphlets, handbills, local gazetteers, rumor mills, pictorials, and cartoons, students will map communication circuits that linked authors, journalists, shippers, booksellers, itinerant storytellers, gossipers, listeners, and active readers.