• (The) Research of the performance art and culture
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• no.18
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• pp.315-346
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• 2009

Korean 'Sin-Pa' play is a way to examine self-reliance of Korean culture and influence of Japanese culture on the Korean one in the early modern times. Although the 'Sin-Pa' play has been estimated negatively in many aspects, such an estimation can be different depending on the methodology. Therefore, I tried to explain a characteristics of the rise of 'Sin-Pa' play. While making these trials, I made efforts to reappreciate the developing process of Korean 'Sin-Pa' play and its theatrical structure and value. Particularly, I focused on structure of 'Sin-Pa' play in the context of an actual cognition of colonized Korea. Based on the 'Sin-Pa' play's repertoires I found out that one of the representative characteristics of Korean 'Sin-Pa' play is a changing process from orality to literacy. And I made attempts to uncover some ideological functions and their effects of 'Sin-Pa' play, focusing on and whose story line is usually consisted of 'provocation-pangs-defeat' while it interacted with 'provocation-pangs-penalty' of the structure of melodrama under the contemporary cultural conditions. 'Sin-Pa'' play can be considered as a performance mode to accept the Japanese value embedded in the colonized Korea since the 1910s on the one hand and to resist the overwhelming power of western culture imported through Japan on the other hand. In other words, it was closely related with the cultural-field of that period. Based on these results of this research, I tried to outline what the mode of 'Sin-Pa' was, what it reflected, and what it desired for under the influence of the contemporary cultural conditions. I analysed double qualities of 'Sin-Pa' play as a dominant narrative and/or a resistant narrative considering its relationship with the people of colonized Korea. And also I examined the place of the 'Sin-Pa' play in the history of theatre and in the history of culture.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.13 no.10
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• pp.103-112
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• 2013

This study is the subsequent full-scale research to explore an undisputed top Korean TV drama writer, Su-Hyeon Kim, more profoundly, who has been out of scholarly pursuits. As it begins with discussing her mixed tendency by genre, we discuss about a useful reading method of the writer's relatively conservative genre, a home-drama. For the purpose of the study, it sets up the intertextuality theory. This study assents to that criticism of diminishing in its original meaning of M. Bakhtin's dialogism, which led J. Kristeva to name and fix the term. Therefore this paper mainly applies the Bakhtin's intertextuality theory to analyze common elements of the writer's and . Also it applies the G. Gennette's intertextuality of 'imprints' and 'transformation' between hypotext and hypertext to figure out their correlation. The analysis shows that the writer's home-drama realizes its mutual relationship and intersubjectivity of the Bakhtin's core intertextuality concept, which results in gaining viewers' popularity. And it also explains that the writer uses 'repetition' and 'transformation' method of intertextuality to contain its intended message in her own home-dramas. As the result of the study, to the writer, Su-Hyeon Kim, while a melodrama genre is for her fundamental inquiry of a 'privative', 'fractured' human being, a home-drama genre is for her message of the only solution of a 'family' to that inquiry with her own intention.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.16 no.10
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• pp.573-587
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• 2016

This study is the one of the first full-scale subsequent research of a TV drama writer who has been out of scholarly pursuits. Along with the 5 advanced research, this study is to analyze Su-Hyeon Kim's difference and her underlying consciousness by applying the Bahktin's dialogism to the author's creating lines instead of existing speech research. Bahktin's dialogism, its core of polyphony, presents a definite purpose to a artistic creation of language. That is to require the author to have 'outsideness' 'boundary carried over' and 'excess of seeing' in a author relation with characters as it leads the characters to 'the whole'. It means an equal relations of mutual independency between the author and the characters. Also this relations accompany by 'unfinalizability of dialogue'. This study ascertains whether the dialogism actually being realized or not in her lines of of her early stage, of melodrama, and of home-drama. The result of this study shows that the she creates 'polyphony', diverse voices of characters, with her mutual independent relations with characters, that is the voices of between characters, between characters' inside. This research also shows that she realizes 'unfinalizability of dialogue' in her drama work itself of open-end as well as in her lines. She has her own consistent distinction of creating lines to be a her drama work itself, that also means to explore language of human beings's existence, and language of perception, instead of using it as a simple tool of making a drama. This study is to explore a subsequent research of the author's lines with another Bahktin's carnivalesque as the lines's importance and the theory's vastness.

• 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.

• Journal of Popular Narrative
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• v.25 no.3
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• pp.9-40
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• 2019

This study presents an investigation into South Korean films in the 1990s in the aspects of genre change and emotional reorganization. The 1990s witnessed a change of genres and a paradigm shift in the history of Korean films according to the revolutionary changes of the film industry structure and media environment. Believing that these changes had something to do with emotional changes driven by global capitalization symbolized by democratization in 1987 and the foreign currency crisis in 1998, the investigator analyzed the phenomena in film texts and examined the opportunities and context behind them. Unlike previous researches, this study made an approach to the history of Korean films in the 1990s with three points: first, this study focused on why the romantic comedy genre emerged in the 1990s and what stages its formation underwent since there had been no profound discussions about them; secondly, this study analyzed the biggest hits during the transitional period from 1987~1999 to figure out the mainstream genres and emotions during that period since these hits would provide texts to show the genre domain and public taste in a symbolic way; and finally, this study grew out of the separate investigation approach between melodramas and romantic comedies and looked into an emotional structure to encompass both genres to make a more broad and dynamic approach to South Korean films in the 1990s. History flows continuously without severance from previous times. When there is attention paid to inflection points and opportunities in the continuum, it can show the dynamics and structures of changes. This research led to the following conclusions: the mainstream genre of South Korean films had been melodramas until the 1980s. The old convention had been kept to offset or suture contradictions and excessive elements deviant from the structural consistency. Here, the structural consistency refers to no compliance to rational regulations or trade. The process of genre reorganization in the 1990s happened while securing some distance from the convention of making the structural consistency a sacrifice. The direction was to reinforce control through reasonable rationalism and logic of capital. It developed into romance, which would start with comedy to keep distance from the objects through laughter, heighten the level of remarks, and expand criticality, symbolize emotions with taste items, and build through the logic of mutual consensus and practical trade. In the 1990s, the South Korean films thus developed in a direction of moving away from the narrative of urgent pathos based on unconditional familism. It was on the same track as the entry of the South Korean society into the upgraded orbits of democracy and capitalism as the twins of modern rationalism since the latter part of the 1980s.