Korean Studies Commons^™

K-Pop Or K-Death? The Mirrored Oppression From Hollywood In The 1930s, Molly Welsh

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

In the 1930s, the film industry in Hollywood set the standard of “Hollywood filmmaking” with its development of star-contracts so oppressive, actors would be trapped for years within them. However, the implications of creating such a star-system have far surpassed what William Hays believed he was doing in the 1930s. In South Korea, a big star-system still exists and in many ways, mirrors what the United States did in the 1930s. What is informally known as “K-Pop” is a label for the music industry that seeks to emulate western ideals not only in looks, but in practice. This system allows …

Utopias Misplaced: The Cost Of Outsourcing Dystopian Poetics To North Korea, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

This is a slightly revised version of the text of a talk that I (Seo-Young Chu) gave as part of the Fall 2014 Franke Lectures in the Humanities at Yale University. I'm sharing the text here to make the lecture more accessible. Topics include: North Korea/the DPRK, the "uncanny body politic," the uncanny valley, "dystopian poetics," what it means to outsource dystopian poetics, the intersection of aesthetics and politics. Authors/artists mentioned include: Thomas Hobbes, Mary Shelley, David Mitchell, Marjane Satrapi, Song Byeok, Sun Mu, Masahiro Mori, Andy Warhol. The talk also discusses the James Bond film Die Another Day.

Kim So-Wŏl’S Chindallaekkot (Azaleas) As An Immersive Environment, Wayne De Fremery, Jusub Kim

Barowsky School of Business | Faculty Scholarship

According to English poet Sir Philip Sidney’s well-known Apology, poetry is meant to instruct and delight. In the spirit of this assertion, our ongoing experiments algorithmically detect patterns in vernacular Korean poetic texts and manifest them creatively in digital environments. Our aspiration is to deepen the discussion of vernacular Korean poetry by enabling engagements with Korean poetic texts that privilege image over discourse, if only temporarily. The aim is to see, quite literally, what Korean poems can be in order to deepen discussions of what they are or might mean. This project extends the authors’ previous work by attempting to …

Printshops, Pressmen, And The Poetic Page In Colonial Korea, Wayne De Fremery

Barowsky School of Business | Faculty Scholarship

By analyzing the way vernacular Korean poetry of the 1920s was produced, this article initiates a study of the sociology of Korean literary production. Based on a survey of forty-five vernacular Korean books of poetry produced between 1921 and 1929, bank records, Japanese colonial government records, and printed interviews, the study describes the people, organizations, and technologies involved in the production of vernacular Korean poetry in the early twentieth century. It suggests that a small number of men in a few printing facilities working within restrained typographic conditions were responsible for printing the extant corpus of Korean vernacular poetry from …

Introduction To Against Harmony: Radical Buddhism In Thought And Practice, James Mark Shields

Faculty Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

An Analysis Of The Impact Of Housing Policies On Housing Prices In South Korea, Daeil Kwon

MPA/MPP/MPFM Capstone Projects

The South Korean government has been intervening in the housing market for a long time to either activate or stabilize housing prices. However, there is a controversy about the effect of housing policy in South Korea. I analyzed the effect of housing policies as well as other factor s (interest rate, cost of renting, inflation, stock price, unemployment rate, exchange rate) on housing prices nationally as well as in northern Seoul and in southern Seoul, from January 2000 to January 2015 (181 months of data).

According to the results of my regression analysis to test the effect of housing policies, …

Science-Fictional North Korea: A Defective History, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

Kafkaesque, Orwellian, eerie, surreal, bizarre, grotesque, alien, wacky, fascinating, dystopian, illusive, theatrical, antic, haunting, apocalyptic: these are just a few of the vaguely science-fictional adjectives that are now associated with North Korea. At the same time, North Korea has become an oddly convenient trope for a certain aesthetic – an uncanny opacity; an ominous mystique – that many writers and artists have exploited to generate striking science-fictional effects in texts with little or no connection to North Korean reality. (The 2002 Bond film Die another Day, for example, draws from North Korea’s science-fictional aura to animate North Korean super-villains who …