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Web novels are one of the most actively adapted genre novels under a new medium called the Internet. Research on cultural content implemented on top of digital media is naturally closely related to environmental changes in digital media. The same goes for Web novels sparked by the identity of Web platforms. Especially in the case of web novels, the platform itself that provides them has triggered direct changes in genre code and reading patterns. From this perspective, this thesis wanted to examine the formation process and strategic features of web novels, which became content and products on the web platform environment. First of all, through the formation process ranging from communication novels to Internet novels and web novels, I arranged the transition to digital media and the change of genre novel market. This was an attempt to extract that Web novels not only have continuity as genre novels, but also have a turning point as digital content. Web novels are digital content that internalizes the values of the Web 2.0 era. It should also be a core product that grows the pie in the market in its own right. This paper noted that web novels are content that embodies these consumption values. So this thesis considered about what is the visualization and commercialization strategy of the web-based novels that is currently formed, and what is the current status of the web-based romance novels as the content and the product that is driving OSMU most actively in the process of commercialization. Through this process, I found that the greatest characteristic of web novels as genre novels that have evolved into digital content is their division and crack of genre.

Through the expansion of platforms in the media era, this paper notes the phenomenon in which ‘high-teen romance drama,’ a genre which had been marginalized in the past, began to re-emerge. It analyzes the ‘high-teen romance drama,’ which is moving from TV to the Web and being produced in various ways, while successfully returning to the TV drama format. This study sums up the latest trends in TV and web-based high-teen romance dramas, and as a case study, this paper examines the characteristics of the ‘high-teen romance drama’ in relation to the platform’s environment through the web drama A-Teen, TV drama 18 Moment. Due to the restriction of ratings, high-teen romance dramas have been one of the largely marginalized genres on television. But in the web space, high-teen romance dramas are no longer non-mainstream. The high-teen romance drama has been solidifying its position through the Web, with absolute support from young viewers. Web dramas are gradually expanding their influence on the genre and subject of TV dramas. The high-teen romance drama is one of the most prominent examples of this trend. The popular interest and success of the high-teen romance web drama has brought the forgotten high-teen romance drama back to TV. The web drama A-Teen is a high-teen romance drama about everyday life and love of high school students, and became one of the most popular and popular web dramas, leading to a Season 2. A-Teen actively utilizes teenage culture and expression, and a strategy that leads to empathy among teenage viewers. In A-Teen, love is recreated in a way that relieves the depth of overconsumption emotions. Instead of dealing in depth with the inner conflict over love, it takes an approach ofpresenting the emotional change of love in real time and forming a consensus with the acceptor. The TV drama 18 Moment is one of the programs that has helped refocus attention to TV-hitting romance dramas. 18 Moment underlines the growth of the characters, with the main characters reaching maturity through love as fresh and innocent teenagers. The TV drama 18 Moment is a high-teen romance drama that has been transformed into a way to apply the web-fadding high-times grammar while retaining the typicality of existing TV hagwons to suit the TV broadcasting environment. As the Internet becomes more ubiquitous, video content is changing based on the newly emerging platforms. Dramas no longer mean just traditional television media. While considering the limitations of TV, this paper analyzed the background of the rebirth of the high-teen romance drama, which had been marginalized, through the web platform. This is meaningful in that it identifies and considers the increasing popularity of this genre of drama.

This paper is an attempt to discuss the history and the current state of ‘SF theaters.’ SF theater is still an unfamiliar genre to the public, and may surprise some, given that the stage is perceived as an insufficient space for stretching the scientific imagination. Since 2010 works that bring the scientific imagination into the theater have frequently been performed, and a recognition of SF theaters began to be established. Producers came to be absorbed in human psychology, and our isolation amidst the progress in technology, as well as in the absurdities of the world, while giving up the ideal of realistic descriptions. This became the foundation for SF theaters in South Korea today. Starting from the research history and the conceptual change in SF theaters, this study examined the status of SF dramas going back to the colonial period for SF theaters. Through inquiring into the history of SF theaters, we were able to derive the following implications and problems. Firstly, as they are based on future society or technical improvement without consideration of scientific probability or rationality, the scientific imagination is too absent for the work to be named ‘SF theater.’ Secondly, while being highly evaluated as an attempt to integrate science and stage in an era that emphasizes convergence, when we delve into the creativity of a material it is noticeable that the view of the world is still regressive. Thirdly, there are many cases in which scripts lean on SF classics or Japanese original works. Nevertheless, if young creators’ diverse attempts in a genre can breathe with the contemporary audience desiring a new material, the foundation of a Korean-style SF theater may be expanded to include more significant work.

Since This study is about game novel. I’m going to discuss the flow and features of game novels. Game novels developed in Korea, the game industry developed and made it possible. Fantasy novels, Muhyeop novels, and the generation of games met, so game novels could develop. By looking at the trends of game novels, I want to lay the foundation for the study of popular literature genre. The reason behind the emergence of game novels is the meeting of the game generation and the novel. The types of game novels can be distinguished according to the ‘location of the main characters’ and ‘the narrative style’. It is not the best, but it is the minimum work to identify the genre. The biggest characteristic of game novels is their connection to games. It also uses the system of the real game. Another characteristic is that a variety of variations are possible with other genres. Game novels were influenced by fantasy novels and Muhyeop novels. Game novels now hold a solid place in the realm of popular literature. But the limits are also clear. It is the repeated use of game novel progression. Here are the limitations that game have to overcome. In addition, active research should be carried out. This study is intended to promote research on these game novel genres.

The purpose of this paper is to elucidate the characteristics that make Guillermo del Toro’s film Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) a fantasy film, and the meaning and function of the labyrinth motifs closely related to it. Tzvetan Todorov defined the ‘fantastic’ as the hesitation between natural and supernatural interpretations in the face of supernatural events that invade reality. In Pan’s Labyrinth, the fantastic continues to be seen, because the film does not allow the hesitation to disappear; thus, the fantastic does not enter the ‘uncanny’ genre or ‘marvelous’ genre, and because it keeps its fantastic state. In this case, the labyrinth symbolizes art as a passage into the fantastic world and a space that represents it. Rosemary Jackson saw the fantasy as a “literature of desire to compensate for a lack resulting from cultural constraints” and thus repeatedly dealing with unconscious materials. Del Toro’s film shows the character of the fantastic as an expression of desire by allowing ‘family romance’ to take place in the fantastic world. In this case, the labyrinth symbolizes the mind as a place of desire. Kathryn Hume defined fantasy as a reaction to reality, like mimesis, and ‘departure from consensus reality.’ The film, operating in a ‘vision’ genre, satisfies its definition by allowing the fantastic world to illuminate the reality world through ‘contrastive’ technique, and brings out the fantastic it has. In this case, the labyrinth symbolizes the world as a mirror of the world of reality. Thus, Pan’s Labyrinth is representative of fantastic film in that the fantastic functions very effectively, and the labyrinth appearing in this film can be evaluated as a motif that is full of meaning by symbolizing all three elements of art, world and mind. The significance of this paper is to shed light on how a motif works in a particular genre through the above considerations.

This paper aims to examine to the political unconsciousness of social movies that have caused social repercussions in the 2010s, and to study the social imagination of Korean films at that time. Korean Movies such as <The Attorney>(2013), <1987>(2017) and <The Taxi Driver>(2017) reflect the ethos of civil society based on common sense and justice. The epic structure was the same as that of ordinary citizens, who move toward a public space (court, square) after awakening their political correctness. More than anything else, the fact that such films were based on “a historical fact” could have been a strategy to avoid censorship in the era of the blacklist. In these social films, courts and squares have become places for democracy. The conservative government of the time was tired of anti-government resistance and the politics of the square. Thus, films from directors and producers blacklisted were difficult to produce. That’s why the court in the movie during this period could become a symbolic proxy for the “legitimate” reenactment of the politics of the square, which was subject to censorship and avoidance by the regime of the time. Meanwhile, the square has gradually become the main venue for political films that advocate “historic true stories.” The square of the 1980s, which appeared in the movies, will be connected to the Gwanghwamun candlelight square that audiences experienced in 2017. Furthermore, it was able to reach the concept of an abstract square as an “open space for democracy.” At the foundation of these works is a psychological framework that equates the trauma of the failed democratic movement of the 1980s to the trauma of the failed progressive movement of the 2010s. Through this study, we were able to see that social political films in the 2010s were quite successful, emphasizing “political correctness” and constitutional common sense. But they also had limitations as “de-political popular films” that failed to show imagination beyond the censorship of the blacklist era.

This study aims to analyze the post-humanistic imagination that has emerged as a major academic thesis in Korean literature, especially novels. In particular, this paper focuses on Cho Ha-hyung‘s two novels Chimera’s Morning(2004) and A Prefabricated Bodhi Tree(2008), published in the early 2000s, for intensive analysis. Post-humanism can be seen as an extension of post-modernism that tried to overcome the limitations of modernity and seek to establish a new world view. In particular, this thought pays attention to the comprehensive understanding of how the rapid development of science and technology, which has developed since the 20th century, has changed the view of humanity and human-centered civilization itself. At the concrete level, it is developing in the direction of constructing a new subject idea by reflecting and dismantling Western-, reason-, and male-centered power mechanisms that are the core of modern civilization. Cho attempts to discover and re-illuminate the surrounding figures, non-humans, and objects that were not noticed in the classic works written in the past. This ideological flow reflects the fact that the concept of human beings, which had been dominated by the humanities in recent years, has been completely changed, and the natural science and technology perspective is applied to the discourse field in various ways. From the point of view of post-humanism, objects that have not been classified as humans and objects that were considered inferior to humans should be included in human or comparable levels. These questions generate interdisciplinary research tasks by involving the large categories of philosophy, such as ontology, epistemology and empirical fields, as well as calling for the participation of the entire literature, science and social sciences. Against the backdrop of a disaster-hit world, Chimera’s Morning and A Prefabricated Bodhi Tree depict human beings as variants transformed by bio-technology, and creatures made out of the artificial intelligence built by computer simulations. Post-humanistic ideas in Cho’s novels provide a reflective opportunity to comprehensively reconsider the world’s shape and human identity reproduced in the text, and to re-explore boundary lines and hierarchy order that distinguish between human and non-human.

This article is a reexamination of the feminist criminal narrative I wish for what is forbidden by Yang Gui-ja in the context of the rise of the women’s movement and consumer culture of the middle class in Gangnam in the 1980s and 1990s. At this time, the explosive media culture served to strengthen the ideology that placed the middle-class family at the center as well as the consumption culture. The combination of consumer media culture, women’s movement and democratization created a soft and domestic male image while visualizing the material foundation of the middle class in the 1990s of South Korea. In this novel, the domestic male image transforms the feminist criminal narrative into the narrative of the femme fatale attacking the stability and dignity of the middle class family, and at the moment of the transformation, the feminist woman Kang Min-ju is killed by a lower class man who has admired and loved her. This novel is not only current but also signifying as a text that overlaps sociocultural reproduction and feminist issues of the middle class based on Gangnam in the 1990s. This is because it shows the sociocultural context of femicide, such as serial murder of targeting women, as a core code of criminal narrative to be held in Korea since the late 1990s.

Barrier-free films enhance accessibility to audiovisual image contents by providing specific information on screen and through sound so that people with vision or hearing loss can receive the same amount of information as those without disabilities and immerse themselves in the audiovisual images. This study pays attention to barrier-free audiovisual contents in relation to the cultural civil rights of people with vision or hearing loss in South Korea. While institutional efforts have been made in the 2010s to improve the access to audiovisual media of people with vision or hearing loss, the goal of enabling people with vision or hearing loss to fully enjoy all audiovisual contents at a level equal to the non-disabled has not yet been realized. Amid the lingering conflict between disabled groups and multiplexes that has lasted years, the global video streaming service Netflix has aggressively threatened the dominance of local multiplexes with the launch of its Korean service. As Netflix, which is subject to U.S. regulations guaranteeing the rights of people with vision or hearing loss, has produced original dramas and movies involving Korean production teams, the cultural civil rights discourse of the disabled has transitioned to the issue of the rights of cultural consumers crossing national borders in the era of globalization. Changes in the media environment raise the issue of civil rights guarantees in which disabled people enjoy the right to simultaneously watch movies and comment on movies by participating in a common discourse, equally with non-disabled people. The “right to be part of the audience for Korean cinema” for Korean deaf people, which has long been neglected, should also be considered as a cultural civil right that crosses the boundaries of language, nation and disabilities. This essay examines the current issues surrounding the right to cultural entertainment of people with vision or hearing loss in South Korea in conjunction with the contemporary trend of rapid changes in the media environment and the global spread of the movement for cultural civil rights of people with disabilities, and suggests the need for visual culture studies to take a serious step toward disability studies.

Kim Chan-sam’s <世界一周無錢旅行記> was released in 1962. This was a time when the general public was strongly restricted from traveling abroad. Most of the people lived in ‘domestic’. Low development and political upheaval continued. The readership wanted a fantasy, which came out of a desire to escape from the peninsula. So was to become more popular around the popular characters called ‘Kim Chan-sam’. Kim Chan-sam had to be a pushover to the public. This figure had to be secular and de-politicized. Above all, ideological bias had to be removed. The book’s imaginary geography is the "world as a non-communist state" with a high purity. The Cold War ideology was prevalent throughout South Korean society. Kim Chan-sam knew exactly what he could and could not tell the South Korean reader. He couldn’t tell you the reality of my readers not being able to travel abroad. Not to mention a society locked up ‘domestic’ on the Korean reality. The study analyzes Kim Chan-sam’s storytelling strategy. Looking at the meaning of the travel fantasy,agenre of the 1960s, I would like to ask why travel writing in our time is still bound by its past limitations.

In the 1970s, the full-scale development of the area now known as Gangnam began, ushering in the era of real estate investment on apartments which transformed housing styles in Korea. Apartments were pitched as the most ideal type of housing, creating a competitive market of high demand and skyrocketing prices. The apartments were also viewed as a means of quick asset investment among middle-class Koreans. Within this apartment frenzy stood the female real estate speculator, the bokbuin. This study seeks to locate the bokbuin in the real estate development market after the late 1970s. The apartment speculation boom cannot be attributed to the bokbuin alone, yet she became the target of public anger and criticism, singled-out as being responsible for fueling illegal and unethical investments. The apartment boom of the 1970s was in fact generated in large part by the government, developers, construction companies and realtors. While their pursuit of profit was deemed as legitimate, the bokbuin’s conduct was mostly tainted by presumed illegitimate and greedy motivations. This study problematizes this gendering of real estate investment and treat the bokbuin as a byproduct of the family-centered culture in East Asia. Analyzing Im Kwon Taek’s film “Mrs. Speculator”, Park Ki Won’s conte, “Bokbuin”, Park Wan Seo’s short story, “Children of Paradise”, “The People of Seoul”, this study shows that bokbuin’s pursuit was not hers alone; it was the collective pursuit with her husband for the enhancement of family finances. This study argue that the bokbuin embodied the thickly misogynistic climate of the 1970s that projected the chaotic rise of greed onto the woman.

This paper take a media archaeological approach to cinema transformed into a narrative medium during its transitional period, 1903-1915. To accomplish this, I will explore the question of as which narrative medium cinema was imagined and also how it was institutionalized as a narrative medium with authorship. I will explain that the imaginary and real ideas and changes on cinema resonated with each other on the foundation of its technological aspects such as indexicality, 23 frames/sec. and montage. It was during the transitional period that cinema was transformed from a medium representing spectacle to a medium of narration. The establishment of the American film copyright law in 1912 was an institutional, real outcome from the contemporary understanding of cinema as a narrative medium. At the same time, various ideas emerged that led to imagining of cinema as a complete narrative medium, incomparable to any other. From a media archaeological perspective, the imaginary ideas of media resonate with their actual course of development. These imaginary ideas are not just imaginary, but rather reflect the contemporary desire for the medium. This paper looks into the transitional period based on this media archaeological point of view. To this end, this paper will briefly introduce the notion of media archaeology as a media theory and then discuss Eric Kluitenberg’s concept of ‘an archaeology of imaginary media’ and its methodologies. Second, it will explore literary and cinematic imagining of cinema as a powerful medium of storytelling, while discussing the ways in which cinema’s technological characteristics played a decisive role in these imaginings. Also to show the techno-deterministic role of cinema in the real world, this paper will explore how its technological characteristics were considered as an important element in the processes through which America’s first motion picture copyright was institutionalized in 1912 after two historical copyright cases: one is Edison v. Lubin in 1903 and Kalem v. Harper Brothers in 1909. Ultimately, this paper will lead us to an understanding of the history of cinema as a medium and its developments in more multi-layed way, as communication between the real and imaginary, and give us perspectives toward what cinema is.

Fantasy emerges from the cracks and crevices of rational reality. Italo Calvino says, “Fantasy is possible when the reader stays at a certain distance without falling into the text.” Fantasy does not form farthest from reality. It comes from the confusion between reality and fiction. In short, fantasy does not exist on the contrary of reality, but on the boundary of reality. Reality and fantasy are also structurally intertwined. We can’t distinguish the reality from fantasy clearly. In fact, in this case, the reader or audience is confused about whether what I see is real or not. Todorov calls this case “hesitation.” Hesitation is a key element of fantasy. Two texts that expressed “hesitation” are Kim Young-ha’s short novel Vampire (1997) and Wes Anderson’s film The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014). On the surface, these two texts seem to have nothing to do with narrative structural similarities. And both also arouse readers’ and audiences’ interest by letting confuse reality to fantasy. In Kim Young-ha’s Vampire, we can look at the process of confusion of reality called “narrative infection” when a text is read to the reader. In the movie The Grand Budapest Hotel, we can find a strategy to make an unreal story feel like a fact in history. And we can also find a process in which the success stories of alienated characters become reality through ‘solidarity’ in the film. This paper is a study of how fantasy creates “reality”, makes readers feel fantasy, and how it spreads through these two texts.

This paper analyzed the ways in which “others” were reproduced in Korean movies in the 1970s. In the midst of the social changes of the era, such as urbanization due to rapid industrial modernization, many people became laborers for industry in order to obtain the fruits of modernization.But the landscape of others, which was inevitably produced in the process of constructing such subjects, has been limited to analysis that is focused on gender and youth discourse. This article aims to extract the landscape of others in the 1970s by adopting a different perspective. The way in which the other is present can be divided into the following two categories. First, in 1970s film, the family community, in contrast with 1960s film, has disintegrated and cracked, due to the inability of others to enter or leave the community. The desperate perception that the family community can no longer function as a stable foundation or center of the constitution, and that it cannot have a sense of security and belonging,is revealed through the way the others are wandering in and out of the community. Second, ‘Death’ is an element of social life in the violence of the national ideology of the 1970s, and the everyday exceptional state. The way in which the ‘other’ is completely eliminated from the normal subjectivity requested by the state and is deported in film reflectshow everyday death or potential death is part of life of the 1970s. Normal life pursued through rapid urbanization and industrialization leads to the death of the other beings, but the way of existence of others is the desperate reality of the 1970s, when the boundaries of the state that provide stability and belonging are broken. As a result, the landscape of others in the 1970s reveals a violent reality that destroys the perfect middle class family discourse that industrial modernization was oriented around in the 1970s, and that produced masses of others who caused numerous deaths. In spite of regime censorship, Korean films were popularly revealing the violence of life brought in by the 1970s, following a detour of representation.

More than a few existing studies on popular narratives that pay attention to ‘place’ tend to adopt as their theoretical framework the celebrated distinction between space and place. According to this distinction, to put it simply, space is allegedly mobile, whereas place is static. Given this distinction, and in this age of high-mobility, where the spaces of mobilities seem to rapidly and extensively undermine the places of immobilities, would studies on popular narratives focusing on ‘place’ still remain convincing? Referring to David Seamon’s recent book Life Takes Place: Phenomenology, Lifeworlds, and Place Making, this article aims to consider the possibility of studies on popular narratives in the era of high-mobility. To explore the concept of ‘place’ through phenomenological methodology, Seamon’s book uses a theoretical framework called the ‘progressive approximation,’ which is attentive to synergistic relationality. According to this approach, the place should first be put under scrutiny as a whole, i.e. as the monad of place. Phenomenological studies on the monad of place as a whole identify places as the fundamental condition for human beings. Then, in accordance with the ‘progressive’ order of research, places are studied as dyads, i.e. as binary oppositions. Through these analyses, movement/rest, insideness/outsideness, the ordinary/the extra-ordinary, the within/the without, homeworld/alienworld are identified as the five dyads of place. To make a detour around these binary oppositions and confrontations, however, phenomenological studies on place now advance to the higher order of six place triads including place interaction, place identity, place release, place realization, place intensification, and place creation, whereby the study of place progressively approaches the ‘approximate’ essence of place. Reflectively asking himself about the idea of ‘place’ in the high-mobility era, the author of this informative and insightful book submits an answer that place is still the fundamental sine qua non of human beings. However, this answer is more likely to be bounded by the binary opposition of space/place, and movement/rest accordingly. In this article, I suggest as an alternative and hopefully more promising answer a perspective of transcending this kind of a dead-end dichotomy and of performing ‘place-making’ through the mobilities themselves, while presenting a noticeable example of the manner in which research on popular narratives could begin from this perspective.