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Korea
Organized Panel Session
What happens when a literary text breaks loose from its original media boundary and crosses over to an adjacent field of, say cinema? The crossover happens frequently enough and has also attracted considerable amount of attention from scholars, although within the limitations of a center-periphery dichotomy. Overcoming such limitations of previous studies, this panel will analyze how texts move beyond their media boundaries through the creation of, what we call, a ‘contact zone’ – an ethical field that enables the creative process of transcending media boundaries.
This panel will discuss the creative and ethical interactions that occur at the ‘contact zones’ between Korean literature and cinema from the 1930s to the 1970s. Chon will focus on the Korean film Sweet Dreams, a loose adaptation of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, and show how the creation of Korean talkies enabled the erasure of both the state and media boundaries. Sohn and Chong will discuss the exchanges between poetic and cinematic imaginations of gendered subjectivities by examining Mo Yunsuk’s poem Wren’s Elegy and its film adaptation by Kim Ki-young. Kim will show how Korean film was able to make a fissure in state-sponosred anti-communism by examining the change that comes over the ‘enclosed space’ of Ssaritgol in the filmic rendition of The Myth of Ssaritgol. Lee will analyze how the female character Kyŏnga in Ch'oe Inho’s Pyŏltŭl ŭi Kohyang emerges in the contact zone between the literary and the cinematic, retaining the power of a literary rendition, with added power of the image.
Hyung Jin Lee
Waseda University, Japan
Youngju Ryu
University of Michigan
Woohyung Chon
Chung-Ang University, Republic of Korea
Irhe Sohn
Smith College
Ki-In Chong
Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Japan
JinGyu Kim
Seoul National University, Republic of Korea
Hyung Jin Lee
Waseda University, Japan
Youngju Ryu
University of Michigan