Session 5 (10/6) readings

[Anonymous]

Tales of Ch’unhyang and Simch’ŏng

-Popular tales with strong female characters
-Virtuous women embodying Confucian values

These stories are great resources for a Language Arts unit. Students may learn about Confucianism and then read these stories through that lens.

Possible topics:
-What do these stories reflect about the cultural values of their time period?
-Does Confucianism empower or oppress women?
-Are these women "strong" women by today's standards?

[Anonymous]

I really like your suggestion for using The Song of Ch'unhyang and The Legend of Sim Cheong as part of a Language Arts Unit. The possible topics you discussed are great too.
I searched the Internet and found two great websites that share concise versions of each. The Story of Ch'unhyang, the tale of a faithful wife, can be found on the "Things Korean" website: http://nucci.free.fr/chunhyang.htm

The Legend of Sim Cheong, the most popular story of filial piety in Korea, can be found at http://www.korea.net/NewsFocus/Culture/view?articleId=72737. As a bonus, you will find that it is in the middle of an article on fairy tales to share on Parents' Day. It has a couple of other Korean tales.

[Anonymous]

Michael Seth's chapter on "the Hermit Kingdom" offers an interesting parallel to today's North Korea. There is trade and diplomacy going on within both versions of Korea, but it's the general populace that doesn't interact with outsiders. Xenophobic cultures exist in other regions as well, some even more extreme, but it seems that Korea in particular stands out as an isolationist nation. Are inroads being made like in Cuba? How long can regimes like North Korea truly last? I recall that in Sociology classes we were told that while powerful, Charismatic leaders can only control a nation while they live. Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, Castro, even Romania's Ceaușescu.

[Anonymous]

I've always been in support of equality between men and women. To disregard and, in fact, neglect half of the population as ineffectual and unimportant has always sounded completely backwards to me. If you mean to build or rebuild, include everyone. Doesn't that make more sense? That Korean women paid attention to the feminist movement occurring in the US is applaudable.

[Anonymous]

To consider, for those interested in Simone de Beauvoir's study:

[font=Georgia, serif]If woman seems to be the inessential which never becomes the essential, it is because she herself fails to bring about this change. Proletarians say ‘We’; Negroes also. Regarding themselves as subjects, they transform the bourgeois, the whites, into ‘others’. But women do not say ‘We’, except at some congress of feminists or similar formal demonstration; men say ‘women’, and women use the same word in referring to themselves. They do not authentically assume a subjective attitude. The proletarians have accomplished the revolution in Russia, the Negroes in Haiti, the Indo-Chinese are battling for it in Indo-China; but the women’s effort has never been anything more than a symbolic agitation. They have gained only what men have been willing to grant; they have taken nothing, they have only received.[/font]

[Anonymous]

"The Second Sex"

[font=Georgia, serif]The reason for this is that women lack concrete means for organising themselves into a unit which can stand face to face with the correlative unit. They have no past, no history, no religion of their own; and they have no such solidarity of work and interest as that of the proletariat. They are not even promiscuously herded together in the way that creates community feeling among the American Negroes, the ghetto Jews, the workers of Saint-Denis, or the factory hands of Renault. They live dispersed among the males, attached through residence, housework, economic condition, and social standing to certain men – fathers or husbands – more firmly than they are to other women.[/font]

[Anonymous]

I posted a couple passages that I had remembered reading when I was in college at CSUF. I don't remember the class, exactly, but it must have had something to do with contemporary literature. What I found interesting was Beauvoir's discussion on ONE defining, then, the OTHER. (There can only ever be something defined as the "One" if there is then something to compare the One with, and that comparison must then be the Other. Historically, and biblically, women have always been defined as such.

[Anonymous]

According to our history books America first discovered Korea in the 2oth century. How different our history with Korea is when you add in the incidents from the mid19th century, American sailors being left to burn alive on a ship perhaps in an attempt to maintain control of their national identity, to keep the Korean borders closed, to closely monitor trade between countries, to maintain the purity of their country.

[Anonymous]

Here is the Ancient China unit and lesson plan with activities for the 6 grade level.

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[cgao]

Please download and read the attached PDFs.
edited by cgao on 10/2/2014

[Anonymous]

I really appreciated Dr. Jung-Kim's lecture about the role of women in Korea. I had no clue about the women's movement to struggle for respect and dignity. It's interesting to compare the women's rights movements from different parts of the world, especially when you realize that women in Korea had more rights than women in other so-called "developed" countries. Also, I really appreciated that Dr.Jung-Kim stated that Korea in fact has its own culture and that not everything is copied from the Chinese culture.

[Author]

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