Oriental languages and civilizations

Educational Goals The curriculum of Korean studies at ISO aims to provide international and national students with a better understanding of Korea not only on the linguistic but also cultural profile. The course in Korean Literature will be dedicated to the period from its origins to the Chosŏn period (1392-1910). Several poetic literary genres will be analyzed: hyangga, ch'angga, sijo and kasa. We will focus in particular on the birth of the novel (sosŏl) which reached the peak of success in the seventeenth century, as a conclusion of the evolutionary process that, drawing on the indigenous cultural heritage and the Chinese narrative tradition, led to the achievement of the Korean alphabet Hang'ŭl and a rich production of literary prose, which joined the Chinese one. The novel P'ansori, a literary form based on the tradition of oral transmission that uses, no longer mythological or supernatural figures but, human stereotypes of the time, will also be studied. Some passages will be read and commented on within selected works. Specific Goals. At the end of the course the student will have to know the general lines of the history of Korean literature from its origins to the Chosŏn period (1392-1910), with particular attention to the relationship between literary texts and the cultural, historical, artistic and linguistic context in which they have been produced. Specifically, the student must acquire a certain knowledge of the literature and culture of the country he studies the language, through the tools provided to him for the analysis and interpretation of a literary text. To achieve this goal, in addition to lectures, the reading and a critical and contextualised analysis of a selected representative works of the literary period will be particularly helpful. The student will therefore be able in the future to analyze not only the literary and stylistic characteristics, but also the historical, social and philosophical ones of the text.