• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.50
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• pp.77-101
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• 2018

Even in our modern era, the projection of monsters in the recent literature contains the critical imagination of human existence for the posthuman age. The meaning of the monster-abject, especially as from the perspective of feministic criticism, contains criticism of the violent and oppressive patriarch as observed in the modern times. This article focuses on the gendered imagination of the discussions of the "abject" discussed by Julia Kristeva, and the "monstrous femine" discussed by Barbara Creed. Kim Eon-Hee's poems and Han Kang's novels, which have been examined extensively for analysis, show that the practical strategy of abject that goes beyond hate and sublime, wonder and joy through the imagination and concepts of monsters. The monster-abject strategy of Kim Eon-Hee's poem can be summarized by the narrative method of mirroring and the imagination of the truncated body. Mirroring falsification, which mimics the male speaker, is a method that some feminists strategically utilize in relation to the problem of female aversion in recent years as noted in the literature. In Kim Eon-Hee's poem, "becoming a man" and "imitating a man," through the method of mirroring appear as an image of cutting to dismantle the body. In that way, the narrative strategy of the abject that draws out abominations and bizarre effects which contains a strong critique of the patriarchal dominant ideology. The monster-abject strategy of Han-Kang's novel is embodied through the being of plants and the process of vegetarian-anorexia process. The world of the adject which was oppressed in the Han-Kang's novel, returns to the senses of the body through the symbol of the body. It is noted that the fictional characters who realize the repressed desire through the pathological symptom expressed by the female, go on to body perform active transformation. The sense of a body in a novel is not only a rejection of the world of animalman-civilization, but also a radically questioning of the noted and recognized boundaries between human beings and non-human being entities. The two writer's works show that the imagination of the monster-adject is not limited to rejecting the existing gender categories, but also goes in the direction of exploring the possibilities of various associated gender actions.

• Journal of Popular Narrative
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• v.26 no.1
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• pp.175-209
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• 2020

This paper examines how the cinematic representation of the Japanese military "comfort women" stimulates 'imagination' in the realm of everyday life and in the memory of the masses, creating a common awareness and affect. The history of the Japanese military "comfort women" was hidden for a long time, and it was not until the 1990s that it entered the field of public recognition. Such a transition can be attributed to the external and internal chronopolitics that made possible the testimony of the victims and the discourse of the "comfort women" issue. It shows the peculiar status of the comfort women history as 'politics of time'. In the same vein, the cinematic representations of the Japanese military "comfort women" can be found in similar chronopolitics. The 'comfort women' films have shown the dual time frame of the continuity and discontinuity of the 'silence'. In Korean film history, the chronotope of the reproduction of "comfort women" can be divided into four phases: 1) the fictional representations of "comfort women" before the 1990s 2) documentaries in the late 1990s as the work of testimony and history writing, 3) melodramatic transformation in the feature films in the 2000s, and 4) the diffusion of media and categories. The purpose of this article is to focus on the first phase and the third phase in which the issue of 'comfort women' is represented in the category of popular fiction films. While the "comfort women" representations before 1990 were strictly adhering to the framework of commercial movies and pursued the sexual exploitation of "comfort women" history, the recent films since the 2000s are experimenting with various attempts in the style of popular imagination. Especially, the emergence of 'comfort women' feature films in the 2000s, such as Spirit's Homecoming, I Can Speak, and Herstory, raise various questions as to whether we are "properly" aware of issues and how to remember and present the "cultural memory" of comfort women. Also, focusing on the cinematic representation strategies of the 2000s "comfort women", this article discusses the popular politics of melodrama, the representation of victims and violence, and the feature of 'comfort women' as meta-memory. As a melodramatic imagination and meta-memory for the historical trauma, the "comfort women" drama shows the historical, political, and aesthetic gateways to which the "comfort women" problem must pass. As we have seen in recent fiction films, the issue of "comfort women" goes beyond transnational relations between Korea and Japan; it demands a postcolonial task to dismantle the old colonial structure and explores a transnational project in which women's movements and human rights movements are linked internationally.