The Korean Popular Culture Reader
472
The Korean Popular Culture Reader
472eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Contributors. Jung-hwan Cheon, Michelle Cho, Youngmin Choe, Steven Chung, Katarzyna J. Cwiertka, Stephen Epstein, Olga Fedorenko, Kelly Y. Jeong, Rachael Miyung Joo, Inkyu Kang, Kyu Hyun Kim, Kyung Hyun Kim, Pil Ho Kim, Boduerae Kwon, Regina Yung Lee, Sohl Lee, Jessica Likens, Roald Maliangkay, Youngju Ryu, Hyunjoon Shin, Min-Jung Son, James Turnbull, Travis Workman
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822377566 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/07/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 472 |
| File size: | 19 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Kyung Hyun Kim is Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures and Director of the Critical Theory Emphasis at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Virtual Hallyu: Korean Cinema of the Global Era and The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema, both also published by Duke University Press.
Youngmin Choe is Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California.
Read an Excerpt
THE KOREAN POPULAR CULTURE READER
By KYUNG HYUN KIM, YOUNGMIN CHOE
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2014 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5488-8
CHAPTER 1
BODUERAE KWON
TRANSLATED BY YOUNGJU RYU
The World in a Love Letter
INTRODUCTION: DEFINING YONAE
According to literary critic Kim Ki-jin, the Korean word that refers exclusively to romance, yonae, was a twentieth-century invention. Writing in the mid-1920s, Kim noted that "the word yonae had begun to be used only recently," entering popular vocabulary seven or eight years before as the shortened form of the expression chayuyonae (free love). Based on Kim's recollections, we can thus surmise that yonae became part of the common parlance in Korea at the end of the 1910s. Chinese and Japanese mediation was essential. In the classical world of Chinese letters, which had stretched over Korea, China, and Japan, the graph traditionally used to refer to the passion between the sexes had been yon ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]), but ae ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) began to be used also as having a Western feel. Yonae emerged as the combination of the two graphs. The first observed use of the word yonae in East Asia occurred in the early nineteenth century, when Western missionaries in China chose the word as translation for love.
But it was in Japan of the late nineteenth century that the word yonae gained traction. Behind yonae hovered words like love, amour, and Liebe, as well as the distinctly foreign sensibility that such words seemed to encode. "There is no Japanese equivalent to the English word love," lamented Kuriyagawa Hakuson, the author of an influential treatise called The Modern View of Love (1921, 1929). "When it comes to expressions like 'I love you,' and 'Je t'aime,' there simply isn't a way to render them adequately into Japanese. The linguistic sensibility that exists in English or French simply doesn't in Japanese." Yonae was coined precisely in an attempt to translate this foreign linguistic sensibility. As a neologism born in the process of translation, yonae secured circulation by distinguishing itself from existing passions and stigmatizing them as vulgar and unclean. For this reason, yonae has sometimes been identified with its foreign origin and associated with the indignity and violence of foreign domination in the twentieth century.
In Korean, yonae translates the love between the sexes exclusively. The love of God, of humanity, of parents and friends all qualify as love, but not yonae. This point of distinction was particularly important when the word began to be fashionable around 1920. Contained in the language itself was the notion that there was something special to be highlighted in the love between a man and a woman, that the connection between the sexes had to be singled out for attention among the myriad relationships that human beings forge over the course of their lives. In this regard, we can briefly examine the history of the word sarang, another Korean word that means love but has much broader usage today than yonae. Sarang initially meant to think about someone and was not used widely even after it took on the modern meaning of love. It was only after the spread of Protestantism that sarang came to be identified with God's love and gained wider circulation. In the turbulent 1900s, sarang was also pronounced in the realm of nation-state theory. "Of love [sarang], the highest, the most constant, and the most true and righteous is the love of country," insisted one editorial of Tongnip sinmun [The Independent]. "Is your love for His Majesty the Emperor greater than your love for your own life?" demanded another. When another editorial exhorted its readers "to love your brothers and fellow countrymen ... as you love God," the love in question was this sarang that was to be legitimated first and foremost in reference to God and the country.
Sarang, however, metamorphosed into the love between a man and a woman in Na To-hyang's novella of 1920, Youth. In one scene, a minister gives a sermon and concludes that "one who doesn't know love and doesn't practice love is one who is already dead" after waxing eloquently about the love of God and country. The protagonist reinterprets the minister's message in his own way: "I must love love. For loving love is loving God." This unbeliever who "bows his head before the illusion of a young woman, not before God," and who considers reason more absolute than God or the nation, is the protagonist of Korean literature in the early 1920s. At a time when popular desire for education and culture was reaching a feverish height in the period immediately following the March First Movement of 1919, yonae emerged as the protagonist of its time. It enticed the men and women of the new generation who had just gained access to modern educational institutions. It brought about a revolt against the absolute authority that parents had held over marriage decisions and caused numerous scandals ultimately ending in an affair or even murder. Yonae was also the driving force behind the sudden popularization of unfamiliar expressions like "sweet home," the new emphasis on the couple-centered nuclear family over the traditional institution of multigenerational family, and the proposal for "men and women regardless of age to eat together in laughter and joy," overturning the age-old custom of mealtime separation by gender and age. Not only did yonae lead to a myriad changes in everyday life at the micro-level, but it also transformed the very structure of feeling and form of communication that enabled these changes in the first place.
LOVE LETTERS AND THE IMMEDIACY OF TEXT
At the origin of modern Korean literature, we find love, the romantic kind. It was by leaning on the concept of romantic love that Korean literature tutored itself in the art of writing, nurtured the awakening of individual consciousness, and sharpened the powers of social critique. For Yi Kwangsu, the proverbial "father of modern Korean literature," romantic love was the point of entry for the project of modern literature as such (fig. 1.1). "To a Young Friend" (Orinbosege), his short fiction of 1917, traced the scattered tracks of wandering lovers by employing the form of love letters, giving rise to numerous imitators of its literary style in the process. Similarly the secret to the sensational success of Yi Kwang-su's famed novel, The Heartless (Mujong), rested with the structure of a love triangle at the heart of the plot. When modern literature fashioned itself as a confidential and immediate communication between a writer and a reader, it appealed both to the new sensibility of love and to the renewed medium of letters.
A letter might seem a slow and cumbersome medium of communication today, but to the Korean public of the 1920s it represented speed. When the postal service was first launched in Korea in 1895, only 137 letters were collected in the first fifteen days and the small volume of mail almost guaranteed prompt delivery. Judging from postmarks, a typical letter mailed in Seoul in the 1900s took less than a day to reach another destination within the city. By 1925, the volume of mail had grown to nearly sixty million letters, but the post continued to represent the swiftest and the most direct means of communication. Literature also attests to the expeditiousness of postal communication.
The narrator of Yi Kwang-su's "To a Young Friend" receives a reply to his love letter in three days' time and imagines that "[Kim Illyon] must have mailed her response earlier that day after hesitating whether to send it or not." The very next day, he receives another letter from her in which she asks for his "forgiveness for the breach committed yesterday." This experience of the same-day delivery strengthened the illusion of immediacy attached to the letter. Though it may seem strange to us now, it was not unusual for the protagonist of early twentieth-century Korean fiction to send a letter home and expect a reply the very next day; "if the letter is sent on the night train, it'll get there by lunchtime tomorrow, and if they send a reply right away, I'll have it the day after."
Such expeditiousness of mail added reality to references that ten letters were exchanged in a month and a thousand letters during eight years of romance. Given the state of transportation at the time, when travel between the city and the country routinely took ten hours or more, the speed of letters as a means of communication must have struck the Korean public as all the more impressive. But no matter how immediate a letter may seem as a mode of communication, it is still a mediated communication. As the phony love letters in New Fiction works such as It's Spring Again (Chaebongch'un) and The Cry of Wild Geese (Anuisong) show, there are few things in the world easier to forge than writing. In Hyon Chin-gon's Fog Grows Thin (Chisaenunangae), the protagonist's friend intercepts a love letter and forges a reply himself, and in Yi Kiyong's "My Brother's Secret Letter" (Oppa ui pimil p'yonji), a playboy sends out ardent love letters to many different women at the same time. In short stories of Kim Tong-in and Yom Sang-sop, both entitled "The Will" (Yuso), even a document bearing life-changing consequences is not to be trusted. On the pretext of looking out for a younger friend's interest, the narrator of Kim Tong-in's story manipulates the friend's decadent wife and finally kills her after forcing her to change her will. In Yom Sang-sop's story as well, a character named D. writes a fake suicide note and is then overcome by puerile emotions at the sight of his distraught friends. At one end of the literary spectrum, there was already a clear sense of skepticism toward both the gesture of confession contained in a letter and its ornate rhetoric.
Such skepticism, however, could not unsettle the widespread view that the letter represented the most intimate and truthful form of communication. This belief, to be sure, could not have been possible without developments in the postal service that made letter-writing almost as quick and reliable a means of reaching another as a physical encounter. But also at work was the belief that the act of writing occasions an eruption of genuine emotions. In addition, the letter provided a physical token that allowed the distance from the loved one to be bridged. While early modern Korean literature contains ample instances of physical contact between the sexes—a good example is the problem an unwed mother posed in Double Crystal Tears (Ssangoknu), and sexual encounter is an important plot element in "To the Frail of Heart" (Maum iyotun jayo), "New Year's Eve" (Jeya), and "The Era of the Young" (Cholmuni ui sijol) as well—the purity of yonae had already become a familiar ideology. People "believed in the sacredness of romantic love. They respected it." In time, the argument that the spirit and the body are one would be articulated, but the dictum that yonae must be sacred and pure complicated the problem of direct physical experience. It was in this context that the letter emerged as a marvelous medium that promises the experience of love, albeit an indirect one.
"A crisp envelope" that seems to have been "doused with perfume" (Fog Grows Thin), a package containing a "pink Western-style envelope" and a "charming volume of Western poetry" ("That Night" [Kunalpam]), or "a letter written on jade-hued paper embroidered around the edges in red" ("A Blooming Maiden" [Kkopinunch' onyo])—the materiality of a letter, not simply its message, had the power to move. The stationery, perfume, and little ornaments like dried flower petals enclosed with the letter were no less important than the expression of one's inner self through language. Accordingly, detailed advice proliferated on the etiquette of correspondence. When writing to a gentle lady, for example, the writer was advised to use cream-rose or pink stationery and orchid perfume, and enclose forget-me-not petals; when writing to a student, silver-gray stationery, jasmine perfume, and two tickets to a music concert; and to a widow, white paper and black tulips. Once again, it was the woman question that drove these trends. As the sender, the woman had to find ways to express herself, and as the recipient she had to examine her image in being addressed a particular way. A letter's materiality emblematized the materiality of the woman's body; it was for this reason that the physical letter sometimes provided greater allure than the message it contained. The sight of a young man "gazing at the delicate, small letters written on an almost translucent paper," seeking greater satisfaction than what the text can give, became typical. Young men even prized a letter of rejection and would shower trembling kisses upon it, and the physicality of the letter sometimes drove them to utter ruin. In Kim Won-ju's "To Avoid Lust" (Aeyok ul piharyo) a young man goes to the extreme of becoming a monk in order to keep himself from falling under a woman's spell, but is ultimately undone by a single letter—and the female body it delivers.
THE ROLE OF INTERMEDIARIES AND THE INDIRECTNESS OF COMMUNICATION
The first attempt to institute a modern postal service in Korea dates back to 1884. The opening of the Bureau of Postal Services on December 4, however, became the famed scene of the Kapsin Coup. It would take another decade for regular postal operations to begin, with the establishment of the Bureau at the capital and local offices in 1895 and Korea's admission into the Universal Postal Union in 1900. The service then continued to expand in scale even after 1905, when Korea became Japan's protectorate, so that by 1912 there were more than five hundred postal stations across the country. Postage ranged from 5 p'un to 5 chon in 1895, and a regular letter cost 3 chon to mail in 1920. At first, mail was collected and delivered once in the morning and once in the afternoon, but service was soon expanded to four times daily.
Although the basic system was thus in place for exchanging letters, the modern institution of postal service appears to have remained an unfamiliar curiosity to the Korean public at least for the first two decades of the twentieth century. In works of New Fiction (Sin so sol), for example, characters exchange letters through messengers, relying on the institutional medium for international mail only. In Tears of Blood (Hyol ui nu), Ongnyon's mother writes her suicide note on the wall of her house but Ongnyon sends news through international mail; between the mother's act of writing, which is dated in the work as taking place in 1894, and the daughter's, which takes place in 1902, lies the founding of the Korean postal service. This shift also coincides in the text with spatial expansion outward from Korea to the world as the heroine makes her way to Japan and from there to America. The very notion that the postal service could be used to send and receive personal letters and everyday tidings was not widespread at all until the 1910s. To be sure, there were such precocious exceptions as young Chongim and Yongch'ang from Autumn Moon Shades (Ch'uwolsaek), two twelve-year-olds who exchanged their newly established addresses, had their letters shuttled between Seoul and Ch'osan, and "waited for another [letter] though one had arrived only yesterday." It was much more common to turn to the post in cases of emergency, when life hung in the balance, as Sublieutenant Pak did to reach Pingju in Microscope (Hyonmigyong). On the last page of Tears of Blood, a postman "dressed in black, narrow-legged pants, wearing a cap that says 'Mail' on it, and carrying a leather pouch slung across his chest," peeking in through the front gate, was liable to be scolded for "sneaking a look at the inner courtyard of a genteel household." Put differently, a postman in Korea was a strange and curious creature who had not yet attained institutional transparency even in the first decade of the twentieth century.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from THE KOREAN POPULAR CULTURE READER by KYUNG HYUN KIM, YOUNGMIN CHOE. Copyright © 2014 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Preface / Youngmin Choe viiIntroduction. Indexing Korean Popular Culture / Kyung Hyun Kim 1
Part 1. Click and Scroll 15
1. The World in a Love Letter / Boduerae Kwon 19
2. Fisticuffs, High Kicks, and Colonial Histories: The Ambivalence of Modern Korean Identity in Narrative Comics / Kyu Hyun Kim 34
3. It All Started with a Bang: The Role of PC Bangs in South Korea's Cybercultures / Inkyu Kang 55
4. As Seen on the Internet: The Recap as Translation in English-Language K-Drama Fandoms / Regina Yung Lee 76
Part 2. Lights, Camera, Action! 99
5. Regimes within Regimes: Film and Fashion Cultures in the Korean 1950s / Steven Chung 103
6. The Quasi Patriarch: Kim Sûng-ho and South Korean Postwar Movies / Kelly Jeong 126
7. The Partisan, the Worker, and the Hidden Hero: Popular Icons in North Korean Film / Travis Workman 145
8. Face Value: The Star as Genre in Bong Joon-ho's Mother / Michelle Cho 168
Part 3. Gold, Silver, and Bronze 195
9. Bend It Like a Man of Chosun: Sports Nationalism and Colonial Modernity of 1936 / Jung Hwan Cheon 199
10. "She Became Our Strength": Female Athletes and (Trans)national Desires / Rachael Miyung Joo 228
Part 4. Strut, Move, and Shake 249
11. Young Musical Love of the 1930s / Min-Jung Son 255
12. Birth, Death, and Resurrection of Group Sound Rock / Hyunjoon Shin and Pil Ho Kim 275
13. The Popularity of Individualism: The Seo Taiji Phenomenon in the 1990s / Roald Maliangkay 296
14. Girls' Generation? Gender, (Dis)Empowerment, and K-pop / Stephen Epstein and James Turnbull 314
Part 5. Food and Travel 337
15. South Korean Advertising as Popular Culture / Olga Fedorenko 341
16. The Global Hansik Campaign and Commodification of Korean Cuisine / Katarzyna J. Cwiertka 363
17. Back Seung Woo's Blow Up (2005–2007): Touristic Fantasy, Photographic Desire, and Catastrophic North Korea / Sohl Lee 385
Bibliography 407
Contributors 431
Index 435
What People are Saying About This
"A must-read for scholars, students, and fans alike, this path-breaking volume explores the vitality and diversity of Korean popular culture. Through an international collection of experts, we discover the importance of both local contexts of production and the global reach of Korean film, TV, dance, music, and more. It's a stunning work that will stand as the cornerstone of an emerging field."—Ian Condry, author of The Soul of Anime: Collaborative Creativity and Japan's Media Success Story
"This volume is a pleasurable and intellectually stimulating excursion across the many genres of Korean popular culture. Bringing essays originally written in English together with well-chosen and beautifully translated Korean-language essays, The Korean Popular Culture Reader is a vibrant contribution to the field. This who's who of Korean cultural studies will certainly enjoy a wide readership."—Nancy Abelmann, author of The Intimate University: Korean American Students and the Problems of Segregation