본문 바로가기
  • Home
Basic Search

Beyond Nostalgia: The Dialectical Potential of the Jukebox Musical in MJ the Musical

  • Journal of Modern English Drama
  • Abbr : JMBARD
  • 2026, 39(2), pp.7~39
  • Publisher : 한국현대영미드라마학회
  • Research Area : Humanities > English Language and Literature > English Literature > Contemporary English Drama
  • Received : July 17, 2026
  • Accepted : August 6, 2026
  • Published : August 31, 2026

SOJUNG KIM 1

1서울대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This study examines the aesthetic potential of the jukebox musical through MJ the Musical (MJ) and argues that nostalgia and the use of pre-existing songs—often regarded as the genre’s primary limitations in previous scholarship —should instead be understood as constitutive aesthetic conditions. To this end, the study analyzes the musical’s temporal structure and narrative strategy through Walter Benjamin’s concept of Jetztzeit (“Now-Time”) and Susan Buck-Morss’s theory of montage, critically engages with Theodor W. Adorno’s critique of mediation, and employs G. W. F. Hegel’s concept of Aufhebung (sublation) to explain how MJ moves beyond nostalgic consumption. Rather than reconstructing Michael Jackson’s life in a chronological biographical narrative, MJ repeatedly summons fragments of the past into the theatrical present, thereby presenting Jackson as a figure continually constituted in the present rather than restoring him as a completed historical subject. Likewise, pre-existing songs are repositioned not as the products of lived experience but as mediating agents through which life itself is reconfigured. As the performer’s embodiment intersects with the audience’s prior memories, the meanings of familiar songs are continually renegotiated within new theatrical contexts. Via this process, sublation occurs not through narrative events but through the repeated performance and recontextualization of already familiar songs, while the convergence of the performer’s embodiment and the audience’s collective memory reconstitutes subjectivity. Accordingly, this study argues that nostalgia and pre-existing songs need not be regarded merely as inherent deficiencies of the jukebox musical; rather, MJ demonstrates that these genre-specific conditions can serve as the aesthetic basis for such dialectical work, provided the production adopts a corresponding dramaturgical strategy—i.e., a narrative structure that reverses the conventional relationship between life and song, positioning the song as the dramaturgical origin rather than the product of a biographical life. In doing so, this study positions MJ not as proof of a general law governing the jukebox musical as a genre but as a case that reveals a possibility latent within its formal conditions.

Statistics

  • 4 Viewed
  • 0 Downloaded

Tools

Issue List

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2025 are currently being built.

Basic Search Advanced Search