ARTH 586
Japanese Popular Visual Culture Fall 2021
Division I
Cross-listed ASIA 186 / COMP 186
This is not the current course catalog

Class Details

The phrase “Japanese popular culture” often calls to mind comics and animation, but Japan’s earliest visual pop culture dates back to the 17th century and the development of arts like kabuki theater and woodblock prints that could be produced for a mass audience. This course traces Japanese popular culture through a range of visual media: kabuki and puppet theater, premodern and postmodern visual art (ukiyoe, Superflat), classic film (Ozu, Mizoguchi, Kurosawa), manga/comics (Tezuka, Otomo, Hagio), and animation (Oshii, Miyazaki, Kon). The class will also study material examples of Japanese popular culture on display in the Repro Japan exhibition at the Williams College Museum of Art. We will develop visual reading skills to come up with original interpretations of these works, and compare different media to make them shed light on one another.
The Class: Format: lecture; discussion
Limit: 35
Expected: 20
Class#: 1547
Grading: no pass/fail option, yes fifth course option
Requirements/Evaluation: attendance, participation, two 5-page papers, final exam
Prerequisites: none
Enrollment Preferences: students majoring or considering a major in a related discipline
Distributions: Division I
Notes: This course is cross-listed and the prefixes carry the following divisional credit:
ASIA 186 Division I ARTH 286 Division I COMP 186 Division I ARTH 586 Division I

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