Modernism, Pedagogy, and Student Formation in East Asian General Education Curricula

The recent trend in East Asian higher education towards liberal arts, or general education, curricula has largely been justified in terms of economic growth and job marketability－the theory being, in the case of Korea, that these curricular changes will ultimately produce workers with skills better suited to contribute to the new “creative economy.” For the (international) faculty tasked with teaching these future workers to “learn how to learn” and “learn how to think,” however, these institutional and national goals can conflict with actual disciplinary practices, especially in the humanities, where students, for instance, might be initiated into a “hermeneutic of suspicion,” taught to interpret literary, philosophical, historical, and cultural texts with an eye towards unveiling the ideological formations which gave rise to them. Taking the example of modernist literature, with its (oft-contested) disciplinary marker, close reading, this paper seeks to elucidate, in this general education context, some of the consequences and persistent questions arising from what Ben Knights calls “the mutually constitutive relations of pedagogic and scholarly practice.” In particular, I will suggest that modernism and/as pedagogy, while inevitably, if subtly, helping to serve certain economic interests and national narratives, holds the capacity to be both educationally transformative and politically subversive. At the same time, this piece considers the role that pedagogies of (modernist) literature (and other humanistic disciplines) may have, through rhetorical, linguistic, social, and intellectual practices, in forming and socializing these East Asian students who are, themselves, subject to a complex matrix of contradictory influences and competing discourses.