2026, Vol.32, No.2

A Genealogical Reconstruction of Jung Bo-ra’s Horror Novels - Focusing on Cursed Bunny, No One Will Know, and Death Is Always With You

Hong Duck-Gu | 2026, 32(2) | pp.13~46 | number of Cited : 0

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The purpose of this paper is to explore the popular narrative significance of works from Jung Bo-ra’s early and mid-career fantasy fiction that employ the conventions of horror, using a cultural genealogical approach. Chapter 1 critically examines the impact that the judging panel’s description of Jung Bo-ra—as “an author who traverses the boundaries of magical realism, horror, and science fiction”—made when Cursed Bunny was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker International Prize, on subsequent research trends, and presents the rationale for analyzing Jung Bo-ra’s novels through a cultural genealogical lens. Chapter 2 examined how the genre conventions of K-horror, epitomized by Home of the Legends, and J-horror, referred to as Japanese ghost stories, form the foundation of Jung Bo-ra’s horror. Chapter 3 focuses on Jung Bo-ra’s background as a scholar of Eastern European literature and translator, analyzing how Slavic fairy tales and folk tales, as well as the tragic events of modern and contemporary Eastern European history, are appropriated in her novels as forms of alienation and horror. Chapter 4 examines how Jung Bo-ra appropriates Stephen King and Viktor Shklovsky—whom she herself has identified as creative sources of her horror—to explore what Jung Bo-ra’s horror ‘defamiliarizes’ and what kinds of fears it generates through this process. As of 2026, Jung Bo-ra occupies a unique position within the Korean literary and cultural landscape. Much like the labels ‘socially critical horror’ or ‘the protesting writer’ that follow her, Jung Bo-ra’s novels are often understood—or misunderstood—as a utilitarian form driven by the objectives of social criticism and transformation. However, a review of Jung Bo-ra’s early and mid-career works—produced primarily for the online literary magazine Mirror since her debut in 2007—reveals that the origins of her fiction lie in a fascination with the sheer pleasure derived from scary and bizarre stories. The fact that the horror provided by Jung Bo-ra’s work can offer readers a unique kind of satisfaction demonstrates one way in which horror today gains vitality by intertwining with adjacent genres and being reproduced.

The Relocation of Heterotopias in Korean Science Fiction of the 2020s - Focusing on the Works of Kim Cho-yeop, Duna, and Lee Gyul-hee

Choi Ae-soon | 2026, 32(2) | pp.47~79 | number of Cited : 0

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In this paper, I aim to discuss how utopia and heterotopia are not concepts that stand in opposition to one another as fantasy and reality, but rather how heterotopia can exist even within utopia, and how the two are in a mirror-like relationship, much like twins. I seek to demonstrate that a utopia transposed into reality is not a beautiful and peaceful place, but rather one that overlaps with heterotopias of crisis and deviance. Furthermore, I aim to show how an individual emerges from their inner heterotopia to confront society. Every individual possesses an inner heterotopia for personal growth, but every society possesses a heterotopia of crisis and deviance that serves to maintain its order and well-being. Moreover, these spaces are inevitably linked to utopia. I intend to discuss the two spaces—utopia and heterotopia—which are presented in the science fiction works of Kim Cho-yeop and Duna as if they were the two sides of a mirror. First, using works such as Kim Cho-yeop’s Why Don’t the Pilgrims Return? and Duna’s Crossing Beyond the Mirror as examples, I would like to discuss those who leave utopia to confront the real world. While those sent to utopia are the disabled, the poor, and the sick, it is primarily children who occupy the spaces of the attic and the basement. I will illustrate how children escape from the heterotopias of the attic and basement to encounter a “different” world through Lee Gyul-hee’s The Attic Alien and Duna’s Where’s Your Dad? and The King of Heaven. In this paper, heterotopias—which create fissures in utopia and challenge other places in reality—are viewed as “spaces of subversion” against the existing order. Change in the world does not originate from the “center” but rather from the “periphery”—that is, from heterotopias. It is for this very reason that this paper focuses on those who venture “outside” Utopia and those who step “outside” from basements and attics. Moving beyond the off-Earth utopias of science fiction from around the 2020s, we must address the issues facing marginalized groups—such as women, the elderly, people with disabilities, children, and adolescents—through the heterotopic spaces that constitute “other” places right here and now. This raises both the necessity and the imperative to geopolitically reposition them from the periphery to the center.

A New Materialist Analysis of Bo-young Kim’s Ecological SF - Focusing on Whale Snows Down(2025)

Namkyung Yeon | 2026, 32(2) | pp.81~108 | number of Cited : 0

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Recently, Bo-young Kim's works have not only encountered the SF phenomenon as a form of domestic speculative feminism but are also moving toward demonstrating a clear ‘response-ability’ to global ecological trends. This paper analyzes her works that address the ecological crisis through virtual reality, artificial intelligence, deep-sea organisms, and space fungi—products of high technology—focusing on her recent collection, Whale Snows Down(2025), through the lenses of Rosi Braidotti, Donna Haraway, and Karen Barad. In "Loosely Identical You," a future where transmitters are commercialized reveals the illusion of individualism through the chain of extinction and creation at the atomic level, making us realize that we are nomadic beings becoming ‘other’ as the Zoe(vitality) of the life-death continuum. "Ghost Forest is Falling" utilizes the multi-species agency of a closed space habitat to restore an Earth where the principle of symbiosis has been broken due to war and the mass production of non-degradable plastics. ‘Sancheon,’ a space for both scientific and thought experiments, is reborn as a symbiotic ecosystem of eating, being eaten, rotting, and generating, suggesting the possibility of partially restoring the Earth. Finally, "Looking at the Flat Rock" and "Even If It’s Just a Shell" embody the quantum mechanical principle of "intra-action"—a mutual constitution where the act of observation intervenes in the process of materialization within a virtual world of data. These stories highlight the agency of artificial intelligence, which creates new narratives with the deceased in virtual reality, and the people who protect a village’s communal rock over private property even under capacity constraints. Through this, we can confirm the importance of discourse involved in the ethical generation of the material world. As such, Kim's recent SF demonstrates a philosophy of connection that traverses diversity and heterogeneity from the perspective of New Materialism, representing ‘otherwise stories’ that confront the crisis of the Anthropocene. These are stories of non-humans becoming-with humans, and ‘geo-stories’ on a planetary scale that engage in string figuring across borders and species boundaries. By weaving together the materiality of refugees, AI, virtual worlds, and ecology with the philosophies of care, connection, and symbiosis, Kim shares the wisdom needed to break through the current predicament of the Anthropocene.

Platform Infotainment and the Performance of Depoliticization - Apolitical Positioning and Trust Capital on the YouTube Channel Shukaworld

Sueahn Kim | 2026, 32(2) | pp.109~157 | number of Cited : 0

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This article examines how political issues are depoliticized in platform infotainment channels that explicitly foreground an apolitical stance. Taking the YouTube channel Shukaworld as a representative case, the study analyzes the topic distribution and thumbnail composition of 1,724 videos uploaded between 2019 and 2025, and conducts a close reading of the speech structure and editing practices in the “LA Protests” segment from a live stream broadcast on June 15, 2025. The analysis shows that Shukaworld’s apolitical positioning is not constituted by excluding political issues, but by transposing the language of political judgment into other problem frames through economic interpretive codes, the semiotic figuration of public figures, and memetic play. Across the channel, war is recoded as a question of economic sustainability, elections as matters of market volatility and investment opportunity, and diplomatic and trade conflicts as issues of responding to external variables. Donald Trump, in particular, functions as a sign that simultaneously mediates economic variables, international conflicts, and character-based memetic play, becoming a node through which political tension is converted into consumable spectacle. The “LA Protests” episode further reveals that this depoliticizing arrangement is not always stably maintained in live broadcast environments. When Trump’s dehumanizing speech converges with scenes of state violence, the channel’s playful and economic translation devices reach their ethical limits. The YouTube edited version subsequently erases the speaker’s hesitations and the potential for political recontextualization that surfaced during the live broadcast. Through the case of Shukaworld, this article elucidates how trust capital in platform media environments can be accumulated at the cost of suspending political responsibility and eroding ethical sensibility, and clarifies the specific ways in which depoliticization is performed.

The Illusion of “Jokes that Cross the Line” - Comparing High-Contextual Humor in Male Homosociality and Minority Groups

Kim, Si-Yeon | 2026, 32(2) | pp.159~205 | number of Cited : 0

This study examines the political dimensions of humor as a gendered practice, critically analyzing the fictitious construction of "masculine" humor discourse—commonly celebrated as edgy, boundary-pushing comedy. Historically, humor has functioned as the exclusive domain of male homosocial bonding and as a cultural resource for reproducing social hierarchy. Drawing on the anthropological concept of "high-context communication," this paper investigates the divergent ways in which male-centered humor and minority community humor each mobilize contextual meaning. Chapter 2 analyzes sexual and aggressive humor deployed within male homosocial settings. While such humor is often self-styled as transgressive taboo-breaking, its actual mechanisms remain safely contained within dominant norms and normative assumptions. High-contextuality here functions as little more than a rhetorical pose: by evading the risk of exposing the speaker's identity or political position, this humor operates not as genuine transgression but as a "safe provocation"—reaffirming normative authority while displaying social power. Chapter 3 explores the humor of minority communities—including women, queer individuals, and people with disabilities—alongside the recently emergent form of stand-up comedy. In minority humor, high-contextuality is not confined to the rhetorical level; it mediates a genuinely dangerous pleasure that traverses cultural codes, normative boundaries, and identities. Humor thus functions as a political text that directly unsettles the social norms it is presumed merely to flirt with. This study represents a preliminary attempt to rethink the meanings and effects of humor as a social speech act in a more multidimensional way. Whether humor carrying diverse cultural codes can be received and understood is deeply tied to the cultural literacy of a given society. This is precisely why humor demands analysis across multiple registers: its narrative structures and historical genealogies, its sites of performance and communities of reception, and the cultural premises upon which it is grounded.

Aspects in Non-Hegemonic Masculinity Represented in Male-Targeted Web Novels - Focusing on the Reconfiguration of Labor, Intimacy and Homosociality

Kim Ahran | 2026, 32(2) | pp.207~245 | number of Cited : 0

‘24/7 capitalism’ and the precariousness of the subject in the Film Sleep

Kim Hyung Sik | 2026, 32(2) | pp.247~288 | number of Cited : 0

Deviation and Integration of the Female Body in Idol Fandom Fiction - Lee Yu-ri’s Dungdung and Lee Hee-ju’s My Idol’s Baby

Park ShinHye , Kim Tae Soo | 2026, 32(2) | pp.289~315 | number of Cited : 0

This study analyzes how the bodies of female characters in idol fandom fiction relate to space, examining the way fantasy within fandom is narrativized through the body's deviation from, and incorporation into, the idol–fan relationship. It takes as its objects two short stories, Lee Yu-ri’s Dungdung and Lee Hee-ju’s My Idol's Baby. Both center on the relationship between a male idol and a female fan, yet they stand in contrast: whereas Eun-tak in Dungdung passes through an external fantasy space, U-mi in My Idol’s Baby makes her own body an internal space that mediates fantasy. Eun-tak departs from the conventionality of the idol–fan relationship and forms a bond grounded in paternal affection; through an extraterrestrial space, her body comes to converge upon herself. U-mi, by contrast, appropriates and reworks a patriarchal grammar through a capitalist transaction, but once the fraud is exposed her attempt fractures, and she is reduced to a bodily materiality that no language can translate. Depending on where fantasy is located, Dungdung presents deviation from the idol–fan relationship and convergence upon the self, while My Idol’s Baby presents an attempt to deviate from the “normal” that ends in forced incorporation. Despite this difference, the two works share a common condition: because escape from the norms of reality is impossible within reality itself, the female character can only pass through fantasy. Moving beyond prior readings that have treated idol fandom fiction as a reflection of socio-cultural phenomena or as a realization of the fantastic, this study rediscovers it as a narrative of self-construction grounded in the female subject’s bodily and spatial experience. It further reads the texts’ response to gendered political structures through the relation between body and space. In doing so, it shows that, as fandom fiction takes shape as a genre of popular narrative, these two works carry a meaningful gender politics.

Women’s Time and Deferred Redemption - Kim Mal-bong’s The Lineage of the Sun as a Wartime Romance Narrative

PIAO YUEXIANG | 2026, 32(2) | pp.317~356 | number of Cited : 0

This article examines Kim Mal-bong’s The Lineage of the Sun not simply as a wartime melodrama or a popular romance novel, but as a text that reveals the gendered structure of time within a wartime romance narrative. The study focuses on how women’s waiting, labor, emotional adjustment, and maintenance of relationships do not function as a passive time of devotion that guarantees male return. Rather, they operate as a time that defers and reexamines the meaning of male decision, departure, and redemption. The article first analyzes how male passion is staged through the intensity of the present moment and the affirmation of the self. It then examines how guilt, which emerges after the failure of love, does not remain within the sphere of relational responsibility but is transferred into the language of departure and sacrifice. In this novel, however, guilt and departure are not immediately approved as redemption. Female characters continue to regulate their emotions, sustain everyday life, and leave open the question of whether male choice can truly restore a damaged relationship. In particular, Shin-hui’s labor and waiting should not be read as signs of devotion or sublime endurance. They constitute a form of time that sustains wartime life while withholding the final meaning of the relationship. Through this analysis, the article argues that The Lineage of the Sun moves beyond the repetition of popular sentiment and asks upon whose labor and waiting postwar life is sustained. Kim Mal-bong’s wartime romance narrative presents male passion and decision in a compelling form, yet it also shows that their meaning must be tested within women’s sustained time. In this sense, The Lineage of the Sun can be reevaluated as a work that reveals both gendered temporality and a feminist literary consciousness within the form of wartime melodrama.

Identity and Authenticity of the Music Odyssey No Direction Home: Bob Dylan

Sa-Bin Shin | 2026, 32(2) | pp.357~386 | number of Cited : 0

This article examines the musical identity and authenticity of the documentary No Direction Home: Bob Dylan based on diachronic and synchronic discourse. The motivation for this study was to give meaning to the theme of the documentary: musical identity and authenticity. In this music documentary, the meaning of the artist’s attitude is rediscovered as Bob Dylan carries out his responsibilities as an artist (growth, exploration, and change as a musician). No Direction Home by Martin Scorsese establishes the artistic image of Dylan based on dialogue (interviews), scenes, and sequences, which help us interpret what we see on the screen. Furthermore, the documentary features not only performances and recordings from his early acoustic and electric era but also his studio sessions. This attempt highlights the identity of his music, changes in his performance, and the authenticity of his music in an interesting way. Director Scorsese mostly relies on interview footage and audio recordings throughout the documentary to hide his role while allowing the audience to interpret Dylan’s musical identity and authenticity as an artist. Scorsese’s production approach is made possible by Bob Dylan’s music and art, which are premised on the identity and authenticity that deepen and enrich the audience’s act of watching and listening. The aesthetic achievement of No Direction Home consists not in reproducing Dylan’s defined identity but in observing the authentic process of drift in his artistically uncertain identity. Dylan’s identity as revealed in this documentary is not a fixed one but a changing one, and his authenticity reflects faithfulness to change more than inner truth. Instead of simply providing external records about Dylan, No Direction Home explores intrinsic questions and aesthetic thoughts about the conditions under which an artist can perform creative activities.

A Study on the Narrative Structure and Melancholia of the ‘Regretful Top’ Subgenre in Korean BL Web Novels

Eom Chae-min | 2026, 32(2) | pp.387~419 | number of Cited : 0

A Study on Changes in Literary Narratives after the Chronicization of HIV/AIDS in Korean Literature

Oh Eungyo | 2026, 32(2) | pp.421~456 | number of Cited : 0

Circulating Chinatown: The Translation of Ellen-ui Gong (1921) and the Discourse of Chinese Othering in the Transpacific Circuit

YUJUNG LEE | 2026, 32(2) | pp.457~513 | number of Cited : 0

This study investigates how the discourse of Yellow Peril and Chinese othering, originally produced within early twentieth-century American popular culture, circulated to colonial Korea through translation. It focuses on Kim Dong-sung’s serialized Korean translation of Arthur B. Reeve’s The Exploits of Elaine, published in the Dong-A Ilbo in 1921 under the title Ellen-ui Gong (<엘렌의 功>). By doing so, this paper aims to demonstrate through a concrete case that the discourse of Chinese othering was shaped simultaneously along the transpacific imperial circuits. Grounded on the premise that American Chinatown Orientalism and the Japanese Empire’s discourse of Chinese othering were part of a resonant representational system within a transnational imperial network, this study extends Kellen Hoxworth’s transoceanic circulation of blackface into the context of East Asian translation. The second part analyzes the racialized representation of Long Sin and Chinatown in the original text within the context of the American Yellow Peril discourse following the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. It also examines the intersection of race and gender embodied by the “New Woman” Elaine, as well as the internal threat structured by the white male villain. Section 3 examines Kim Dong-sung’s translation strategies through a textual comparison. It analyzes how Orientalism is refracted across three levels: the translator’s explanatory interventions, the displacement of the speaking subject, and the cultural conditions of the target audience. Furthermore, it elucidates how the American Chinatown narrative overlapped with the Japanese Empire’s discourse of Chinese othering and the perception of the Chinese in colonial Korea. The significance of this study lies in proving that translation was not a passive reception of Western discourses, but a complex arena of cultural negotiation within the circulation of imperial racial discourses. Moving beyond the linear diffusion model of cultural imperialism, this study shows that the displacement of discourse through translation always entails recontextualization. Ultimately, it offers theoretical implications by expanding Hoxworth’s Anglophone-centric framework into the East Asian translational pathways.

Neoliberal Time Travel: Quantified Life and Regression Narrative in Reborn Rich

Lee, Hyo-Jeong | 2026, 32(2) | pp.515~547 | number of Cited : 0

This study aims to interpret the “regression” (transmigration back in time) motif—which has recently established itself as a representative narrative technique in webfiction—as a specific form of time-travel narrative that reflects the neoliberal era. It analyzes how the compulsive desires of individuals, internalized under neoliberal governmentality, are expressed through the narrative structure of a “second life” in which they relive a life they “already know.” Under neoliberalism, an individual is regarded as an “entrepreneurial self” who treats oneself as human capital and manages oneself to maximize profits within the market. Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose argue that the core mechanism and technological foundation of this self-management lie in quantification that renders human existence visible, calculable, and measurable. From this perspective, Reborn Rich offers a particularly revealing example of neoliberal governmentality at work. The protagonist approaches life as a carefully managed portfolio, reorganizes social relationships according to principles of efficiency, and continually validates his success through measurable outcomes. Behind such practices of quantification lies a desire to render the future predictable and controllable. Drawing on Elena Esposito’s conceptual framework, this paper analyzes how this novel gives narrative form to this desire—specifically, the process by which the protagonist uses privileged knowledge of the future to align the “present future” with the “future present.” In so doing, the paper argues that time-travel narratives dramatically embody the desires and anxieties of the neoliberal subject, who seeks to perfectly manage even the adventures of an uncertain future. This article is significant in that it interprets the popular boom of regression narratives not merely as a generic trend, but as expressive of a distinctive affective structure of the neoliberal era, in which the open possibility of the future is perceived through fear of uncertainty. Through this, it offers a case study showing how popular narrative mediates between the governmentality of an era and the collective consciousness.

A Study on Immigrant Identity in BEEF - Focusing on the Analysis of Representation Methods of Cultural Citizenship and the Circulation of Revenge

Dooyoung Jeon | 2026, 32(2) | pp.549~582 | number of Cited : 0

Teenage Lesbian Narratives as Mise-en-Abyme - Queer Affect in 2000s Korean Cinema

HyeYoung CHO | 2026, 32(2) | pp.583~622 | number of Cited : 0

This paper analyzes the recurring teenage lesbian narratives in 2000s Korean commercial cinema, beginning with Memento Mori (Min Kyu-dong and Kim Tae-yong, 1999), not merely as a matter of representation alone but as formal and affective devices that organize and disrupt narrative structure. To this end, the concept of mise-en-abyme is extended beyond textual self-reflexivity to designate the operation of a latent narrative stratum, and is reconceptualized through Sara Ahmed's theory of affect as an event that reorients the body and the senses. In 2000s Korean commercial cinema, teenage same-sex female relationships rarely unfold in the present; they persist instead as past events, lost relationships, repressed secrets, or belatedly disclosed truths. Rather than reading this displacement solely as a limitation, this paper interprets it as a mise-en-abyme structure that disturbs heteronormative and linear narrative orders from within. In Memento Mori, the exchange diary functions as a medium that inserts a past queer relationship into the present, situating the viewer in a queer position through what the paper terms a queer pedagogy. In Lovers' Concerto (Lee Han, 2002), a lesbian recollection actively penetrates the heterosexual narrative, producing a queer temporality and a melancholic affect. In Tell Me Something (Jang Yoon-hyun, 1999), the very method of the killings takes the form of mise-en-abyme, splitting the audience into divergent regimes of vision and exposing the epistemic conditions that enforce ideals of victimhood. In The Scarlet Letter (Byun Hyuk, 2004), the moment of disclosure retroactively collapses the heterosexual narrative and the narcissistic male subject altogether. In doing so, this paper illuminates the formal and affective possibilities through which sealed queer pasts leak into the present, unsettling the closure of heteronormative narratives.

Roundtable: The Researcher’s Ttanjit

Hanbit Lee , Jo, Ik sang , Jang Key Young and 6 other persons | 2026, 32(2) | pp.623~669 | number of Cited : 0

This article is a record of the roundtable discussion “The Researcher’s Ttanjit,” held at the Third Conference of Korean Modern Literature Scholars on February 20, 2026. Using the keyword “ttanjit” —roughly meaning side projects or academic moonlighting— the roundtable examined how researchers’ activities beyond the conventional boundaries of research relate to individual scholarly identities and the culture of academic communities. The four presenters explored the meaning of ttanjit from diverse perspectives, drawing on their experiences in comics criticism and teaching, performing arts criticism and planning, web novel writing and publishing, and the production of interview collections and labor-union activities. The discussion suggested that ttanjit is not merely an activity external to research but can be redefined as a process through which researchers engage with colleagues and citizens both inside and outside academia and reconsider the social significance of their scholarly work. The participants also explored the boundary between researchers’ primary work and ttanjit. It was noted that the distinction between the two, shaped by the expectations that the state and society place upon academia, may both create new opportunities for researchers and impose constraints on their lives. In particular, concerns were raised that the current institutional practice of recognizing only journal publications as research outcomes fails to adequately reflect diverse contributions to academic communities. The subsequent discussion addressed issues such as balancing research and livelihood, time management and self-care, connections between academia and society, and participation in scholarly communities, while participants shared their perspectives on the structural conditions facing researchers today and the ways they respond to them. By bringing together diverse experiences and reflections on the boundary between research and ttanjit, the roundtable offered an opportunity to reconsider researchers’ lives and the sustainability of academic communities from a fresh perspective.

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Journal of Popular Narrative 2024 KCI Impact Factor : 0.92

2026, Vol.32, No.2