From Samsung Galaxy Notes to Gangnam Style dances, since the late 1990s, Korean popular entertainment and products have been making substantial regional and international headways. Once a cultural backwater, the intensive export of South Korean products has changed the flow of the transnational circulation of popular media and culture not just East and Southeast Asia, but the larger world. Making up for its geo-political marginality is its newfound soft power status when countless households from Japan to Latin America are watching its television dramas and where teenagers from Singapore to Canada line up for Kpop auditions to be the next Korean popular music sensation.
Accompanying the Korean Wave, or Hallyu are the heightened popular and scholarly discussions of the attributes of this phenomenon. A combination factors have been put forward to explain the rise of the Korean Wave including the release in creative energies arising from political liberalization in the 1990s, technological advancement particular in the era of the digital and social media, and significant investment and sophisticated marketing. In this respect, as a course, the Korean Wave will offer a potentially multidisciplinary engagement with students, many who are already avid fans of Hallyu products and icons.
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