Category: KOREA

Vampires, Confucianism, Christianity’s Latent Monarchism, and the Translation of Sociohorror

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Seriously, now...
This entry is part 44 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

(Note: I’m filing this under Korean SF, though it only fits there if we define SF as “speculative fiction”: still, I think this post does appeal to a crucial question at the heart of the reception of SF and other fantastical genres in cultures foreign to the culture of a given work’s original production. So there.) So I’ll admit it now: I’ve been watching True Blood. Yes, yes, it’s trashy. But as someone who is not very plot-minded, I have to say, it does a particular trick with a knife that I, too, am learning to do. I’m close to …

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Kim Jong Il: Middle-School Fangirl

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You know those crazed Korean middle school girls who are fans of big famous idol groups, who hate the idea of their favorite popstar dating some other girl so much that narratives of gay love among those idol stars are popular in their circles? Yeah, well, I don’t know if Kim Jong Il ever put up a lesbian-fantasy website about Yun Hye-yeong, but if he did, he has certainly taken it down now. The young woman in question was in one of North Korea’s assumably few rock groups, Bocheonbo Electronic Band. So, Kim was in love with her, but she …

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Forthcoming Papers on Korean SF, “Good Night,” and a Summary of “Another Undiscovered Country”

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This entry is part 43 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

Well, I have submitted the final corrected version of my paper on Korean SF films in the 21st century to Acta Koreana: it’s been approved for publication, pending those edits, so I figure that’s one more paper in the can, to bring my current total of pending academic publications to two: “Politics, Ecology on the Korean Left: Anti-Americanism and Environmental Dystopia in The Host” supposedly forthcoming in the Arena Journal. “Another Undiscovered Country: Culture and the Reception and Adoption of the Science Fiction Genre in 21st-Century South Korean Cinema,” which if all goes well should be appearing in Acta Koreana sometime …

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Two Good Korean Films

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I don’t watch a lot of Korean films these days, in part so few good ones are put out, but also because none of the good ones actually play in my neighborhood. No, it’s all junk in my neighborhood, and I’m busy enough that sometimes it’s hard to justify the trek out to Seoul to see something worth seeing. But the other day, Miss Jiwaku dragged me to a couple of great films that were showing in Guro. The first was the omnibus film If You Were Me 5 (시선이 너머). I never managed to see the third and fourth …

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Put Your Mouth Where Your Money Is

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There’s an expression in English about following in action what one says: “Put your money where your mouth is.” This need not have anything to do with money, which in this expression is a metaphor for “action.” (It might include donating money, if one is advocating such behavior, but it need not be limited to that meaning. For example, one could exhort another to put his money where his mouth is in terms of, for example, following through on a claim or a professed belief.) When I was younger, I admired this concept: I liked to suggest people put their …

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Enjoyment

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While grading some homework from my course on Popular Cultures in the English Speaking World, something clicked for me. I was reading through student responses to the episode of How I Met Your Mother that we watched together, and discussed. Something that really stood out for me was the way in which people talk about comedy, or entertainment in general. I’ve noticed it before, in the way many Koreans talk about music, but finally I think I put some pieces of the puzzle together. Now, I’m not 100% sure I have something here–it may be that my students are all …

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The Don’t Talk About History Law

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It’s really hard to talk about Langston Hughes in the context of the Harlem Renaissance without touching on not only his interest in the Soviets and their system, but also touching on why a number of African-American intellectuals (Hughes, W.E.B. DuBois, and many others) were drawn to “revolutionary” ideas, and to Communist ideology — after all, after hundreds of years of things not getting too much better, of pretty constant material, cultural, and social oppression and marginalization, I think it’s not hard to see why some African-Americans would have felt that a sudden, forceful reorganization of society would be the …

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Some Stuff to Check Out

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Stories: That New Yorker story about the AD&D gaming group… what? Yes, really, and it’s pretty good, too. (Thanks for the link, was it Ben?) Some MP3s narrated by Miette: Alfred Jarry’s “The Passion Considered as an Uphill Bicycle Race” and the story it inspired, JG Ballard’s “The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race.” Okay, this is just a book review, but I loved this book, and have had it in my mind often lately, for reasons obvious to those who are in the know, but which those who don’t know might guess wrongly about. …

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Fukushima Radiation Detected in Kangwon-do

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UPDATE: An English-langauge article on it is up now at Joongang Daily. ORIGINAL POST: Okay, so… don’t panic. (Yet.) But yeah, they’re detecting the first traces of radioactive xenon from Fukushima in Korea. (Source article, in Korean.) It’s been detected in the Eastern province of Kangwon, which is to the west of Seoul and over some mountains — that is, on the coast facing Japan. One claim is that the radiation circulated down into Korea after passing over Siberia/Kamchatka, which sets up a disturbing (to me) bit of evidence that, hope as we might, not everything is blowing eastward and …

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Global: What It Really Means in Korea

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In Korea today, one of the great buzzwords is “global”: you hear about “inbound globalization” at educational institutions, you hear about “global marketing,” you hear about “global outreach.” The word “global,” has attained a kind of buzzword status but as one of my students pointed out last semester in a public speaking exam — he gave a speech on the subject — global almost always really means, “Anglo-American.” (Note: by this I mean, English-language of the American subtype. I don’t mean in the sense some Americans seem to mean when they say “Anglo-American”, ie. British American or something.) There’s an …

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