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The Mythological Semantic Effects of Vengeful Ghost Narratives in Modern Korean Drama: Focusing on “Oh My Ghost Clients” (MBC, 2025)

  • Journal of Humanities, Seoul National University
  • 2026, 83(1), pp.559~596
  • Publisher : Institute of Humanities, Seoul National University
  • Research Area : Humanities > Other Humanities
  • Received : January 12, 2026
  • Accepted : February 8, 2026
  • Published : February 28, 2026

Park Jin Hee 1,  Hong Jaebeom 1

1건국대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This study adopts Roland Barthes’s mythology as its theoretical framework to examine how the mythic signifying functions traditionally performed by Vengeful Ghost Narratives are transformed and reconfigured within the labor realities of contemporary Korean society, focusing on the television drama “Oh My Ghost Clients”. In traditional Vengeful Ghost Narratives, the notion of yi-sang-sa (unnatural or unjust death) functioned as a mythic sign that explained and managed ruptures in communal order. In contemporary ghost narratives, however, deaths such as industrial accidents and deaths from overwork — forms of “excessively normalized death” — are presented as new signifiers within discursive practices and come to operate as newly constituted mythic signs. This study draws attention to the paradoxical condition in which death is rendered increasingly invisible precisely because such deaths are explained as “too natural” within the frameworks of law and institutions, statistics, and social conventions. As Barthes argues, mythic signification is not a fixed content but a process in which signifiers and signifieds are combined, displaced, and rearranged under specific historical conditions. From this perspective, “Oh My Ghost Clients” demonstrates a slippage of myth by retaining the traditional signifier of the vengeful ghost while overlaying it with new signifieds — namely, structural violence and the diffusion of responsibility repeatedly produced within contemporary labor sites. Through this analysis, the study argues that contemporary Vengeful Ghost Narratives do not merely reproduce the naturalization of past dominant ideologies, but instead function as a new mythic apparatus that opens a space for social mourning and for questioning responsibility.

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