Global Circulation of Asian Popular Culture:
Description:
Brief description:
Choose one of the specified essay topics and identify an appropriate primary corpus, and critically analyse how your sample texts have changed when placed in dialogue with other cultures. You may wish to consider what is culturally specific about these texts, and what has local and global significance. Your essay should not reproduce material dealt with in your tutorial presentation or literature review.
Do NOT write about Japanese manga or anime, as these are comprehensively dealt with in other units.
Task: Essay
Write on one of the following topics:
1. What advantages and disadvantages are there in making films which combine local Asian themes and Hollywood-style production values? Compare films from TWO countries in your answer.
2. Hollywood adapts and remakes Asian films as part of its insatiable search for new stories, or for new ways of telling half-familiar stories. But adaptation is also driven by perceptions of the otherness of Asian cultures from Western perspectives and a presumed preference of audiences for localised remakes rather than originals. In an analysis of a pair of films – a source and its remake – demonstrate what constitutes the core cultural differences between the two.
3. Circulation of popular culture takes another form in film as International co-production, where the production companies involved are from two (or more) different countries. International co-productions are an effective means of expanding the overseas market, but what other advantages do they have? In an examination of two films, explore the cultural implications of co-production, with particular attention to disparate cultural ideologies.
4. Cultural similarity and distance are favourably but differently perceived by audiences in East Asia in their consumption of media texts from neighbouring countries. A further step – particularly evident in TV Drama series – is to produce a local remake of such media texts. A remake can be a simple transposition from one setting to another, or it can become an original creative work. Explore the possibility for creative adaptation in selected scenes from a drama series that originated in one country and has been remade in another (or in some cases two or three others). [Please ensure that your chosen examples are available with English subtitles, and give full details of your sources.]
Your essay should:
• be 3000 words;
• be presented in 12-pt font, 1.5-spaced, 2cm margins;
• use an approved referencing style, e.g. MLA, Chicago, Harvard, APA;
• be fully referenced with at least five relevant academic references