Transnational modernity, national identity, and South Korean melodrama (1945-1960s)

Unrestricted The Korean proto-melodramatic form, shinpa, derived from Japanese theatrical mode, developed into a major mode of popular theater, literature, and cinema duringthe colonial period. Since the colonial period shinpa or the shinpaesque has always been in (South) Korean modern popular culture, it has never been accepted as a legitimate cultural form and thus, was figured as a mere shadow of (South) Korean modernity.; In the first chapter I analyze Ch'oe In-kyu's two post-liberation films, which have long occupied the pantheon of South Korean national cinema, Viva Freedom (1946) and The Night before Independence (1949). In the analysis I deconstruct the binary opposition of the national and shinpaesque and demonstrate that the nationalist critique that the culture of shinpa is the detrimental remnant of colonialism which puts sacred nationalist missions in danger describes the problematic embedded in nationalist discourse itself.; In the second chapter I discuss the dynamics engaged between postwar South Korean melodrama and shinpa. South Korean postwar melodrama and shinpa interacted with each other in order to create images of modern female identity that questioned and challenged the patriarchal gender order of the period. I argue that through transnational cultural hybridizations melodrama and shinpa articulated modern gender identities excluded from the terrain of the national.; In the third chapter I discuss how the melodramatic mode of historical drama of the '60s was doubly engaged in the relation to narrative of nationalist discourse. '60's South Korean nationalism was primarily drawn to melodramatic rhetoric, deploying it as a discursive apparatus to mobilize the people for the state-initiated modernization project. Historical drama reproduced the rhetoric in its representation of history, but at the same time, by the excessive display of melodramatic sentiments, ruptured the narrative of nationalist discourse, especially its linear temporal structure engineered to move forward the future.; In the last chapter I explore how realism and modernism were discussed in South Korean film discourse of the '50s and '60s and the conventions of shinpa was positioned in the discourse. I address the ways in which film discourse posited the conventions of shinpa in order to legitimize realist and modernist modes of film.