KJCKorea
Journal Central

This study analyzes the representation of characters in modern adaptations of the classical Korean novel <Chunhyangjeon> and examines how these adaptations reconstruct the original narrative and its thematic consciousness. Focusing on the film <The Servant> and the webtoon <Hyangdandion>, the study compares them with the original text to explore the narrative roles of central and peripheral characters, hierarchical structures, agency, and the reflection of contemporary values. Both adaptations reposition characters who were originally peripheral in <Chunhyangjeon> as central figures, thereby reorganizing the narrative hierarchy and creating new storytelling possibilities. In <The Servant>, Bangja is foregrounded, subverting the original character hierarchy and transforming the traditional moral- and Confucian-centered narrative of Chunhyang and Mongryong into a modern narrative driven by desire. <Hyangdandion> brings Hyangdan and Byeonhakdo to the forefront, presenting autonomous life, solidarity, and coexistence as the central themes of the story. Overall, modern adaptations do more than merely reproduce the classical narrative; they reinterpret its structure and meaning while incorporating contemporary social values. This demonstrates that <Chunhyangjeon> and other classical texts can function as dynamic cultural resources, capable of continuous reinterpretation and meaningful expansion in contemporary society.

This article rereads the story of the ghost of the widow Ahn (安氏) in Eou yadam (於于野譚). Departing from readings that treat her food demands as an eruption of repressed desire or her ghost as the figure of an unruly female other, it examines within which frameworks the narrative handles her demands and how those responses fail. Ahn was a childless widow who had taken her nephew into her own house, and from the early Joseon period to the seventeenth century, responsibility for the rites of a married aunt who died without heirs was unsettled between her husband’s line and her natal family. Her ghost’s demands begin with a lavish meal and escalate to flower cakes, daily delicacies, violence, and a request for a farewell feast, ending in plunder by a band of hungry ghosts and the ruin of the house. The farewell feast (餞別), the only attempt in the narrative to close the relationship, fails because it borrows the form of a send-off among the living and thus grants the dead no recurring place in ritual. In the adjacent tale of the state rite in the northern outskirts, the ghost of a woman who died in childbirth obtains a spirit tablet by stating the grounds of her exclusion, while three other food-demanding ghosts become targets of extermination or expulsion within frames of exchange, kinship, or hospitality. Ahn’s ghost, by contrast, passes through the frames of kinship, hospitality, and farewell without settling in any of them. The story thus raises the question of who must meet the demands of a dead relative who is not a direct ancestor, to what extent, and how such a relationship can be ended.

This study examines Hwang Sok-yong’s The Shadow of Arms by focusing on how the U.S.-led order of the Vietnam War, mediated through multiple intermediate actors, differentially distributes protection, risk, and authority across bodies. It draws selectively on Agamben’s theory of the state of exception and discussions of subimperialism to examine overlapping military, administrative, and market relations in Da Nang. The analysis shows that prisoners and the tortured child remain within institutional procedures while receiving weakened protection, whereas Ahn Young-gyu and Pham Quyen exercise limited authority over investigation, interpretation, administration, and resource allocation despite their own subordinate positions within a larger power structure. Oh Hye-jung and Pham Minh, by contrast, secure possibilities of movement across institutional boundaries through money, personal relations, documents, and disguise rather than through formal authority. Ahn Young-gyu’s assistance in Stapley’s desertion, the killing of Pham Minh, and his avoidance of familiar faces before returning home demonstrate that structural constraints limit the range of action without fully erasing responsibility for concrete choices made within those limits. Shame is therefore treated not as evidence that proves responsibility, but as a limited concept for reading the unstable relation a character maintains with his own actions after the fact. Through this analysis, the body in The Shadow of Arms emerges as the site where the hierarchy of war becomes a concrete condition of life and where limited authority, choice, and responsibility arise within relations of subordination.