• Journal of Popular Narrative
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• v.25 no.2
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• pp.217-245
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• 2019

Recently, the interest among Korean broadcasters in the 'observation entertainment' genre has intensified. This study aims to analyze the genre and storytelling of observation entertainment programming from a narratological perspective. The origin of the Korean observation entertainment program began with the 'reality-variety show'. There was a 'real-life' debate in these reality-variety shows, and as an alternative, the observation entertainment program appeared. Documentary filming, omnibus composition, and spatialization of 'everyday' life have led to the recognition of observation entertainment as a single genre. In particular, 'observers' have become a key factor in the observation entertainment program. The subject of the program is determined by who the observer is. The variability of the program format is the same. The observer looks at the observation target on behalf of the viewer. At the same time, he or she serves as a narrator of the program. The observer functions as the most influential factor in the storytelling of the observation entertainment program. In the observation entertainment program, 'observation' is only a form. It is the observer who creates a narrative within this same format to make the difference between each program. Also, voyeurism has been considered a problem in reality shows such as observation entertainment programs. However, the form communicated by observers is not a direct peek, so much of the problem of voyeurism is mitigated. Such observation entertainment programs analyzed through observers are meaningful in that they make people understand the cultural meaning of "reality" in TV and the storytelling of contemporary Korean TV entertainment.

• Journal of Popular Narrative
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• v.27 no.3
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• pp.53-94
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• 2021

This article pays attention to the gender representation of an abominable male abject that reveal class polarization in the movie Parasite. I seeks to read a new aspect of emotional politics in which a precariat man becomes a male patriarch while representing himself with an abhorrent position. Parasite shows a reversal of daughter and son responsible for parents, contrary to the existing family narrative. They teaches the parents' generation how to survive neoliberal that their place is created only when they take away others' place. However, after losing this prospect, Ki-woo confesses to his father that he is sorry first. Ki-taek also attempted to identify Dong-ik with the patriarch, but this male solidarity collapsed by class and committed murder in sudden anger. As a result, Gi-taek goes down to the hateful status of a stinking underground life, and Ki-woo receives a message of ethical reflection from his isolated father. The film gives the father and son the noble status of ethical fighter who fought against the structure of class polarization, especially the ending epilogue and narration emphasizing the ethical responsibility and mutual solidarity between father and son. In this process, the voices of female characters are gradually omitted, blurring gender screening for male characters. Parasite reveals the political reenactment strategy of precariat men in the age of neoliberalism, which is ethical subject by claiming to be a class abject himself. And representing the hate with gender-selecting, it is beautifying the responsible ethics of the patriarch.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.13 no.7
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• pp.38-50
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• 2013

This paper analyzes director Yang Yong-hi's documentary films "Dear Pyongyang"(2006), "Goodbye, Pyongyang"(2009) and her fiction film "Our Homeland"(2012). These films were produced on the base of the director's autobiographical experience, and raise issue of Jainichi-Korean diaspora who be caught in nation-state; North Korea, South Korea and Japan. With the family narratives crossing Jeju, Osaka, and Pyongyang, these films doubt boundaries be set by nation-state, and seek new breakout space. This paper traces restructuring identity in the tensional heterogeneity of nation-state exaction; Integration, unity, uniform education. In conclusion, these films foresee Korean diaspora's future identity from hybrid identities. It shows Korean diaspora's potential of receptivity, openness and solidarity which are required for Northeast Asian peace and the solution of two Korea's hostility.

• American Studies
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• v.44 no.2
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• pp.67-96
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• 2021

The Canadian public broadcaster CBC had successfully aired a sitcom centered on a Korean immigrant family from 2016 to 2021. The show is based on the play Kim's Convenience written by a Korean-Canadian playwright Ins Choi. This study explores literary features of Kim's Convenience that accounts for its popularity; three elements of the show play crucial roles in maintaining the balance between specificity and universality. First, Choi deploys a Korean immigrant story in the form of comedy. Second, the main plot revolves around an ordinary family with generational strains that ends in reconciliation. Third. the Kims are depicted more as an archetypical family than a stereotypically Asian one. By closely interweaving these elements, Choi induces the audience to find commonalities from the show, and racial specificities of the Kim's family become "spicy" attractions of the play.

• The Journal of the Convergence on Culture Technology
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.409-417
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• 2020

Oral-Performance in itself, which successfully narrates one's life, constitutes a kind of decent Verbal arts. The term 'Sijipsali-Narrative' refers to oral narratives portraying a series of events in the course of Women's Life-Story which arise from family life and socio-cultural issues through marriage. As a result, Sijipsali-Narrative belongs to a subcategory of Women's Life-Story. Sijipsali-Narrative can be divided into two categories as follow. One type of Sijipsali-Narrative is the 'Family-Connection sijipsali-narrative,' which results from the relationship between a daughter-in-law and the rest members of the family. Among the 'Family-Connection sijipsali-narratives,' including several forms of Sijipsali such as that of father-in-law and that of husband and that of children, Sijipsali of the mother-in-law is most distinctive. The other type of Sijipsali-Narrative is 'Sociocultural-Connection Sijipsali-narrative', which comes not from human relationship but from general issues a narrator is suffering from as a daughter-in-law in a family. The most universal narrative comes from Sijipsali connected with poverty and historical events, and family history, appearance, attitude of the daughter-in-law and so on can be materials for the narratives. Actually, the two types of Sijipsali narrative is not so much distinguished from each other as intermingled with each other. Sijipsali arising from family relationship can inevitably be related with poverty and some events, which result in conflicts among family members and so harass daughter-in-laws. This thesis has a clear-cut orientation to overview the aspects of the Relationships and Hardships on a 'Sijipsali' Narratives in Korean Women's Married Life.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.15 no.8
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• pp.179-185
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• 2015

This study aims to analyze how the media represents marriage immigrant women in the reality of Korean multicultural society. In particular, by analyzing an EBS documentary titled, 'Multicultural Fierce Conflicts between Mother-in-law and Daughter-in-law', this study clarifies that this content adopted travel narrative to show conflicts between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law and solution of these conflicts. The documentary apparently shows mutual understanding and cultural diversity but still keeps representing these conflicts as individual's 'trivial' problems. Under this way of representation, social and structural problem or institutional problem in reality can be covered up by the medium of travel. It makes such a conflict look like an individual's 'trivial' problem can be solved by individuals.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.17 no.9
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• pp.637-649
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• 2017

This study was conducted to develop a parent's autobiography writing program and to verify its effectiveness. The subjects were 82 college students(52 students in the experimental group and 30 students in the control group) in an university in Seoul. The research design was a nonequivalent control group pretest-posttest quasi-experimental design. The effectiveness of the program was verified by ANCOVA using the SPSS 23.0 program. Parent's autobiography consisted of prologue, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and epilogue. Each chapter of the autobiography consisted of a part of the growth narrative describing the main events of the parents and a part of the introspection narrative describing the writter's feelings. As a result of analysis, first, the parent's autobiography writing program significantly promoted parent-child relationships. Second, parent's autobiography writing programs significantly increased parent-child attachment. Third, parent's autobiography writing programs showed a significant increase in parent-child communication. Based on the results of this study, we discussed the effect and application possibility of the parent's autobiography writing program.

• The Journal of the Convergence on Culture Technology
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.457-462
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• 2023

Director Yoon Jong-bin's new series <The Accidental Narco, Narco-Saints> was streamed through Netflix in 2022 and ranked first in the series rankings. <The Accidental Narco, Narco-Saints> continues the genealogy of male narratives in Korean society that director Yoon Jong-bin has pursued for a long time. In <The Accidental Narco, Narco-Saints>, the main characters choose the path of the diaspora to escape Korean society and seek survival in a foreign country. The two male protagonists of <The Accidental Narco, Narco-Saints> are set up in a hostile relationship, but they have one thing in common: they basically pursue money to "survive". They chose the diaspora to avoid the tyranny of public power in Korean society in the 1980s and 1990s, but Republic of Suriname was the worst place where private violence and public power were completely callused. In there, one becomes a drug lord and the other chooses to act for his duty to Korea. These two different choices can be said to be examples of the light and shade of the diaspora. In <The Accidental Narco, Narco-Saints>, director Yoon Jong-bin inherited the themes of 'family' and 'violence' from previous works, while expanding the geographical area of Korean male narratives he had been exploring.

• Journal of Popular Narrative
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.135-158
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• 2019

The purpose of this paper is to elucidate the characteristics that make Guillermo del Toro's film Pan's Labyrinth (2006) a fantasy film, and the meaning and function of the labyrinth motifs closely related to it. Tzvetan Todorov defined the 'fantastic' as the hesitation between natural and supernatural interpretations in the face of supernatural events that invade reality. In Pan's Labyrinth, the fantastic continues to be seen, because the film does not allow the hesitation to disappear; thus, the fantastic does not enter the 'uncanny' genre or 'marvelous' genre, and because it keeps its fantastic state. In this case, the labyrinth symbolizes art as a passage into the fantastic world and a space that represents it. Rosemary Jackson saw the fantasy as a "literature of desire to compensate for a lack resulting from cultural constraints" and thus repeatedly dealing with unconscious materials. Del Toro's film shows the character of the fantastic as an expression of desire by allowing 'family romance' to take place in the fantastic world. In this case, the labyrinth symbolizes the mind as a place of desire. Kathryn Hume defined fantasy as a reaction to reality, like mimesis, and 'departure from consensus reality.' The film, operating in a 'vision' genre, satisfies its definition by allowing the fantastic world to illuminate the reality world through 'contrastive' technique, and brings out the fantastic it has. In this case, the labyrinth symbolizes the world as a mirror of the world of reality. Thus, Pan's Labyrinth is representative of fantastic film in that the fantastic functions very effectively, and the labyrinth appearing in this film can be evaluated as a motif that is full of meaning by symbolizing all three elements of art, world and mind. The significance of this paper is to shed light on how a motif works in a particular genre through the above considerations.

• Journal of Popular Narrative
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.429-465
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• 2019

This paper analyzed the ways in which "others" were reproduced in Korean movies in the 1970s. In the midst of the social changes of the era, such as urbanization due to rapid industrial modernization, many people became laborers for industry in order to obtain the fruits of modernization.But the landscape of others, which was inevitably produced in the process of constructing such subjects, has been limited to analysis that is focused on gender and youth discourse. This article aims to extract the landscape of others in the 1970s by adopting a different perspective. The way in which the other is present can be divided into the following two categories. First, in 1970s film, the family community, in contrast with 1960s film, has disintegrated and cracked, due to the inability of others to enter or leave the community. The desperate perception that the family community can no longer function as a stable foundation or center of the constitution, and that it cannot have a sense of security and belonging,is revealed through the way the others are wandering in and out of the community. Second, 'Death' is an element of social life in the violence of the national ideology of the 1970s, and the everyday exceptional state. The way in which the 'other' is completely eliminated from the normal subjectivity requested by the state and is deported in film reflectshow everyday death or potential death is part of life of the 1970s. Normal life pursued through rapid urbanization and industrialization leads to the death of the other beings, but the way of existence of others is the desperate reality of the 1970s, when the boundaries of the state that provide stability and belonging are broken. As a result, the landscape of others in the 1970s reveals a violent reality that destroys the perfect middle class family discourse that industrial modernization was oriented around in the 1970s, and that produced masses of others who caused numerous deaths. In spite of regime censorship, Korean films were popularly revealing the violence of life brought in by the 1970s, following a detour of representation.