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Abjection, Telesthesia, And Transnationalism: Incest In Park Chan-Wook's Oldboy, Daniel L. Holland

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Many consider Oldboy be the defining film of the most recent wave of South Korean cinema, with scholars such as Terrence McSweeney and Kim Kyun Hyun arguing the film's representation of South Korean culture through collective memory, trauma, and Westernization. However, most of the current scholarship that surrounds the film does not adequately address the film's prominent theme of incest. My thesis explores the anxious implications of the film's incestuous imagery and reads it as a figure for the film's transnational presence. Specifically, in my project, incest is the nucleus on which I build each argument outward. First through abjection …