• Journal of Popular Narrative
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• v.27 no.1
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• pp.265-299
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• 2021

The purpose of this research paper is to facilitate the understanding of the synesthetic aesthetics in the film The Age of Innocence through the intertextuality among the narrative, paintings, and music in the film. In this paper, a two-dimensional intertextual analysis of the paintings in relation to the narrative is conducted on the paintings owned by Old New York, the paintings owned by Ellen, the portraits of unknown artists on the street outside of Parker House, and Rubens' painting at the Louvre. A three-dimensional intertextual analysis of performances in relation to the narrative is conducted on the stages and the box seats at the New York Academy of Music, in which Charles F. Gounod's Faust is performed, and the Wallack's Theatre, in which Dion Boucicault's The Shaughraun is performed. An intertextual analysis of music in relation to the narrative is also conducted on the diegetic and non-diegetic classical music of the film, including Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 8 and Mendelssohn's String Quintet No. 2, as well as Elmer Bernstein's non-diegetic music of the film. The constituent event of The Age of Innocence represents the passion trapped in the reflection of love and desire that are not lasting, and the supplementary event embodies the narrow viewpoint and the inversion of values caused by the patriarchal authority of Old New York. The characters in the film live a double life, presenting an unaffected surface and concealing the problems behind it. The characters restrain their emotions at both the climax and the ending. The most powerful aspect of the film is the type and nature of oppressive life, which are more delicately described with the help of paintings and music, as there is a limit to describing them only by acting. In intertextual terms, paintings and music in The Age of Innocence continuously emphasize "feeling of emotions that cannot be expressed in language." With a synesthetic image, as if each part were imprinted on the previous part, the continuity "responds to continuous camera movements and montage effects." In The Age of Innocence, erotic dynamism brings dramatic excitement to the highest level, switching between the satisfaction of revealing desire and the disappointment of hiding desire due to its taboo status. This is possible because paintings and music related to the narrative have made aesthetic achievements that overcome the limitations of two-dimensional planes and limited frames. The significance of this study lies in that, since the identification in The Age of Innocence is based on the establishment of a synesthetic aesthetic through audio-visual representation of the film narrative, it helps us to rediscover the possibility of cinematic aesthetics.

• The Korean Journal of Archival Studies
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• no.53
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• pp.45-77
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• 2017

This study intends to rehabilitate the memories of the social other which have been gradually forgotten in the social events overloaded with the undemocratic violence in South Korea today. This study explores a case of Yongsan Tragedy in 2009 among the most tragic events. It notes the autonomous ways in which activist artists would like to memorize the socio-historical events anew despite the emptiness of public records. In other words, this study considers the Yongsan case to be significant that a group of the public, artists, grassroots activists, religion men got together in solidarity so as to create the contested narratives countering dominant memories and thus to signify the records written by the civil society. Among others, activist artists had documented the unofficial counter-memories of socially alienated peoples in terms of planning a series of artistic events such as opening some gallery exhibitions and performance events, issuing a volume of work books, comics and photographies, online broadcasting, and directing some documentaries. Especially, this paper tends to note the documentation of on-site activist artists to record the counter-memories against social oblivion. By doing so, it finally suggests how we could document the Yongsan Tragedy both to search out the archival implications of today's art activism and to insert those artistic records into the commonly shared counter-memories in a more inclusive way.

• Journal of Popular Narrative
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• v.25 no.3
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• pp.181-209
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• 2019

The purpose of this article is to compare zombie narratives in relation to the Other. In previous research, the view of zombies as post-capitalist soulless consumers or workers has been frequently expressed. But in this article, I wanted to look at zombies as the main cause of the collapse of the world and a new future. First, zombies do not only mean the representation of the consumer in the late capitalist era. Rather, it is an awakening subject desiring the outside of the system. As you can see from the Uncanny's point of view, zombies are something that we should oppress as freaks and monsters that threatened the Other. To be a zombie in this way is to meet one's other self, the "Fundamentals of Humanity," and it is the moment when everything becomes the subject ex nihilo, the new beginning. Second, the concept of infection shows a new ethic. Zombie cannibalism is different from the selfish love of a vampire who sucks a worker's blood. Zombie cannibalism is an infection, which is a model of Christian love for one's neighbor. It is a moment of awakening and the beginning of solidarity. It is on the waiting for the solidarity that the zombie hangs in such a way, and the attack on the human being is an active illusion. Third, the situation of the end of a zombie narrative is another event for newness. The anger of a zombie serves not just to show monsters, but acts as a catalyst that accelerates the world's catastrophes. The anger of zombies is the messianic violence that stops the false world, and presents a new way. The emergence of zombies and the popular response to them embody a desire for the possibility of a new subject and world.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.17 no.7
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• pp.79-92
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• 2017

This study analyzed the TV documentary titled on early childhood English education through narrative structure analysis (Chatman, 2003). It performed syntagmatic analysis to clarify the story structure with a focus on the development of events, and paradigmatic analysis to understand the semantic structure hidden in the text by binary opposition analysis. The documentary was constructed in the frame of 'balance-confusion-rebalance', and it was explicitly delivered that the English immersion education prohibited in the private elementary schools has stimulated the market of private English education. However, the government's and students' voices were missing, and the group of parents, private elementary school officials, and people involved in private English institutes played as main agents to lead the discourse of English immersion and early childhood English education in the documentary.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.22 no.7
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• pp.548-562
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• 2022

This study was conducted to diagnose the issues of AI ethics in global content and to discuss what kind of discourse is needed to strengthen human identity. To this end, the study selected Netflix original content "The Social Dilemma" for analysis and adopted narrative analysis as the research method. The analysis results confirmed that "Social Dilemma" showed the structure of a traditional current affairs documentary and mainly used experts and statistical data to develop the story. It also reinforced core content claims by enumerating domestic and foreign cases such as the 2021 Myanmar massacre and the spread of fake news. In addition, the relationship between the characters clearly revealed the binary opposition between developers and media companies as well as users and advertisers. For the solution to the problem, strong regulations on businesses and the suspension of social media use were reached. However, "The Social Dilemma" merely pointed out the misuse of AI technology and had a narrative that ignored human identity and social relationships. Such results raise the need for creating contents that emphasize the importance of human sociality, relationships, and learning ability in the age of AI.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.21 no.11
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• pp.268-280
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• 2021

This study analysed the narrative strategies in TV drama utilized in order to support the recent feminism movements. The analysis revealed that this TV drama breaks away from the clichéd patriarchal drama series. It portrays the main characters are not the sons but the two daughters-in-law, and represents the women challenging the order of the patriarchy, and resolving the issues. In this drama, men's power was removed and female agents were held up to ridicule. In addition, it eradicates the traditional female conflict structures and creates a strong bond between the females. With this storyline, TV series concludes with two achievements. One, the stepmother and the mother co-parent the child instead of the father, suggests that a non-blood related matriarchal family is possible. Two, the heir to the chaebol family, which is traditionally a patrilineal structure, is not the oldest son or the immoral son, but the lesbian daughter-in-law, overturning the idea of heteronormativity that is dominant in the patriarchal system.

• Cartoon and Animation Studies
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• s.33
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• pp.469-502
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• 2013

Webtoons are popularly consumed in Korea. Especially the 'Dailytoons', which are composed of short episodes, are the most popular form of webtoons. This study focuses on the specific narrative structure of the dailytoons, and also tries to figure out what makes webtoons so popular. This study tried to analyze the special features of figures, events, and backgrounds of webtoons. Particularly in webtoons, Korean metropolitan is employed as a background and the daily life of the lower middle class in this big city is importantly used in the story. Each cut of a webtoon consists of simple words and images, and it shows the life of modern people and the way they recognize the reality. The important thing is that the image and the narrative of one cut often appears contradictively. 'Irony' occurs in the process of combination of the words and images. And the life of the lower middle class is depicted 'fun-and-sadly' through irony. For example, the main characters of webtoons are portrayed as persecuted victims because of their lack of information or ignorance. At this point, they are described ridiculously by a play on words. In addition, webtoons often presents twist plots using the scroll bars and margins of 'web' interface. Also it uses parody to show reality in satire. With irony, webtoons represent the daily life of the public, which is cynical as well as humorous. This study tried to suggest that webtoons should attribute its success to 'irony' in its narrative.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.41
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• pp.33-56
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• 2015

Trauma studies have provided useful models for dealing with the catastrophic and disastrous events that an individual and collective group experience. Most important of all, the perspective of post-structuralist trauma study, including Cathy Caruth, became a paradigmatic model and it has been applied to almost all contexts of life. The perspective of this study model, which is called an "event-based model of trauma," focuses on the literal registration of the traumatic event and the accurate and immediate recall of the past. The person directly involved in the event becomes the passive bearer transmitting the truth of a traumatic event. From this perspective, the traumatic subject only undergoes and endures the event and cannot play an active role in constructing trauma and dealing with it. Eventually, the truth of trauma has to be obtained at the cost of the traumatic subject's autonomy and the possibility of his/her agency. The problem here is that the truth, which is reencountered through the literal return of the past, obtained at the cost of the subject's autonomy, strikes a rather fatal blow to the person, than gives help for resolving many of matters surrounding traumatic experience and curing trauma. This suggests that the active way of dealing with trauma on the part of the traumatic subject, rather than the traumatic event itself, is demanded. Furthermore, because more recently, images of disastrous events were viewed "live" by audiences and an immediacy to the event is replicated in public discourse about them, the event becomes more immediately traumatic and there is a more strong presumption that people regard themselves as traumatic victims than before. This is the reason that we must explore an active way dealing with trauma on more human position at this time. This essay aims to examine the limits of the paradigmatic model of trauma study, an "event-based model of trauma," critically through a literary, theoretical text in which it reveals how the literal return of the traumatic past have a fatal effect on the victim; and hopes to suggest "the narrative memory" as a way to deal with trauma from a more humanistic perspective.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.279-292
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• 2011

Movie is a representative media that can transmit stories to audiences. Basically, a story is described by characters in the movie. Different from other simple videos, movies deploy narrative structures for explaining various conflicts or collaborations between characters. These narrative structures consist of 3 main acts, which are beginning, middle, and ending. The beginning act includes 1) introduction to main characters and backgrounds, and 2) conflicts implication and clues for incidents. The middle act describes the events developed by both inside and outside factors and the story dramatic tension heighten. Finally, in the end act, the events are developed are resolved, and the topic of story and message of writer are transmitted. When story information is extracted from movie, it is needed to consider that it has different weights by narrative structure. Namely, when some information is extracted, it has a different influence to story deployment depending on where it locates at the beginning, middle and end acts. The beginning act is the part that exposes to audiences for story set-up various information such as setting of characters and depiction of backgrounds. And thus, it is necessary to extract much kind information from the beginning act in order to abstract a movie or retrieve character information. Thereby, this paper proposes a novel method for extracting the beginning boundaries. It is the method that detects a boundary scene between the beginning act and middle using the accumulation graph of characters. The beginning act consists of the scenes that introduce important characters, imply the conflict relationship between them, and suggest clues to resolve troubles. First, a scene that the new important characters don't appear any more should be detected in order to extract a scene completed the introduction of them. The important characters mean the major and minor characters, which can be dealt as important characters since they lead story progression. Extra should be excluded in order to extract a scene completed the introduction of important characters in the accumulation graph of characters. Extra means the characters that appear only several scenes. Second, the inflection point is detected in the accumulation graph of characters. It is the point that the increasing line changes to horizontal line. Namely, when the slope of line keeps zero during long scenes, starting point of this line with zero slope becomes the inflection point. Inflection point will be detected in the accumulation graph of characters without extra. Third, several scenes are considered as additional story progression such as conflicts implication and clues suggestion. Actually, movie story can arrive at a scene located between beginning act and middle when additional several scenes are elapsed after the introduction of important characters. We will decide the ratio of additional scenes for total scenes by experiment in order to detect this scene. The ratio of additional scenes is gained as 7.67% by experiment. It is the story inflection point to change from beginning to middle act when this ratio is added to the inflection point of graph. Our proposed method consists of these three steps. We selected 10 movies for experiment and evaluation. These movies consisted of various genres. By measuring the accuracy of boundary detection experiment, we have shown that the proposed method is more efficient.

• Cartoon and Animation Studies
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• s.36
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• pp.91-119
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• 2014

This paper analyzed and compared the storytelling of female characters in Korean, American, Japanese animations and revealed the ideal image of woman of each culture. Chapter 2 analyzed the superficial images of the female characters and figured out how these images reflected awareness of a reality. This paper revealed that female characters act as a representative cultural symbols and embodies the paradigm and the order of those cultures. In Chapter 3, this paper analyzed and compared how the female characters solve the dramatic events in the entire narrative structure, and revealed the cultural implications of their action and these events. Korean characters were imitating the idols as an extension of the real world, and American characters were drawn as unreal Super Heroes who were utilized to enhance the order of the world if the United States. Japanese characters, the magical girls are led to create a magic circle and then become surreal goddesses. In this way, this paper revealed that female characters in animation reflect the male-centered ideology of each culture according to the awareness of a reality and cultural paradigm.