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Database Animals: Japanese Anime, Otaku Culture and the Postmodern in East-Asia

COM LIT 10 (4.0 units) – Session II

This course offers insight and introduction to the concepts of modernity and the postmodern, by engaging with important Japanese anime texts in the 90s that shed light on the essence of the contemporary moment, and what defines the postmodern. We will start with some famous anime figures and influential works that have enduring legacies until today, and analyze how these anime capture the psychological nature of today’s consumption patterns, attitude towards narrative and structure of desires. We will also look at how individuals are conditioned not only as objects of consumption but also as self-consuming and self-forming subjects under the postmodern condition. This course will also bring attention to the phenomenon of “compressed modernity” in East Asia, namely, the “compressed” process of industrialization, civilization, and other drastic political, social, cultural change starting from the early 20th century until today. Instead of accepting the critical concepts on modernity and modernization which only developed from the experience and social context of Europe as a norm, students will be encouraged to have an awareness of how experience of modernization and modernity in East Asia is different from Europe, and critical concepts formed in Western academic traditions should always be particularized and contextualized. Repeatability: Unlimited as topics vary. (IV and VIII ).