Modernity, the Road Not Taken by Asians

Woo, Mi-Seong(우미성) 한국현대영미드라마학회 2002 현대영미드라마 Vol.15 No.1

디아스포라적 귀향: 『흑나비』와『안나의 유서』가 재현하는 해외입양아와 한국적 디아스포라

우미성 ( Mi Seong Woo ) 국제비교한국학회 2015 비교한국학 Comparative Korean Studies Vol.23 No.2

이 논문은 1970년대에 제작된 두 편의 한국영화 『흑나비』(1974)와 『안나의 유서』(1975)를 통해 한국인들의 디아스포라적 정서를 유추해보려는 데에 목적이 있다. 변장호감독의 미스터리 액션영화인 『흑나비』와 최현민 감독의 멜로드라마 『안나의 유서』는 흥행에는 성공하지 못했지만 한국영 사 최초로 성인이 되어 모국을 방문한 해외입양여성을 등장시킴으로써 당시 한국영화가 전쟁고아나 해외입양아를 통해 전쟁에 대한 기억과 달라진 한국의 현실을 어떠한 방식으로 재현하고 소비했는지를 보여준다. 1970년대는 유신시대의 개막과 함께 한국의 근대화가 본격적으로 추진되던 시기로 영화산업은 쇠퇴하고 있었지만 한국전쟁에 대한 기억과 급속도로 추진되던 근대화를 바라보는 한국인들의 양가적 감정이 포착되기 시작하던 시기였다. 20세기의 시작과 함께 일제식민, 한국전쟁, 고도의 근대화시 기를 겪으며 정서적 이산과 이탈을 경험한 한국인들의 ‘사후기억’은 계층적 소외와 이탈을 두려워하는 출신지 지향적, 계층 지향적, 젠더 분리적 정서를 형성한다. 한국인들의 디아스포라적 경험은 영화에 재현된 사회적 소수 자인 해외입양아와 사회주변인으로 전락한 호스테스 여성의 멜로 드라마적 스펙터클에 투영되었고 70년대 한국영화는 한국인들의 집단적 사후기억을 반영하는 기제였음을 알 수 있다. 한민족 중심적이었던 전통적 가치에서 탈피해 글로벌 시민사회로 급격히 변모하는 21세기에 한국이 성숙한 다문화사회로 전환되기 위해서는 그동안 학술적 연구분야가 아니었던 한 국인들의 디아스포라적 경험과 이산의 정서에 주목할 필요가 있다. This paper explores the diasporic experience and sensibility of Koreans represented through international Korean adoptees in two Korean films, namely Black Butterfly (Heungnabi, 1974) by Byeon Jang-ho and Anna’s Will (Anna-ui Yuseo, 1975) by Choe Hyeon-min. These are films that represented international Korean female adult adoptees for the first time in the history of Korean cinema. The issue of international adoption in Korea parallels the compressed modernity of Korea and Koreans’ changing social and cultural awareness of kinship and ethnic identity. The paper analyzes the representational mode of adult female adoptees returning from their Western adoptive countries to find out about their roots, which began to emerge in South Korean cinema in the 1970s, and discusses the unique features of diasporic sensibility developed in a Korean context. In both films, the international adoptee returnee serves as a cultural marker and political device for the military regime’s rigid censorship and propaganda to present the nation’s fast recovery from the traumatic war and unprecedentedly rapid economic development on silver screen. The diasporic sensibility of displacement represented through international Korean adoptees functioned as a consolation for the collective postmemory of the South Korean spectators as the diasporic subject, thus, prevented the audience from seeing the material and ontological condition of international Korean adoptees.

<마이너리티 리포트>, 필립 K. 딕의 미국 문화 비판

우미성 ( Mi Seong Woo ) 문학과영상학회 2002 문학과영상 Vol.3 No.2

Science fiction has long been looked down upon as a genre of pulp fiction that does not have much literary value or cultural meaning. However, science fiction writers are just like mainstream authors; highly influenced by their personal experience and contemporary society. Therefore, in some science fiction novels and short stories, the future is sometimes used only as an allegory of the present. Phillip K. Dick is the best example of this. He has been the most popular science fiction writer in Hollywood since Ridley Scott`s sci-fi future noir Blade Runner(1982), which was based on Dick`s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Steven Spielberg`s SF blockbuster movie Minority Report (2002) is another Hollywood adaptation from the author`s short story, which was published in 1956 with the same title. Minority Report is about a pre-crime system, a futuristic police agency that arrests would-be murders before they commit their crimes. Dick logically questions the automatic validation of social consensus by majority, seemingly shedding light on the existence of the minority with the philosophical message that the existence of a majority logically implies a corresponding minority. Despite the additional sub-plot of the missing son and alternative happy ending, a central moral dilemma of the pre-crime system, which is the essence of Philip Dick`s short story, is expertly captured in the movie. However, the film version of Minority Report pays more attention to plausible life of humankind in the 2050s with advanced technological devices and dramatic action sequences than the author`s poignant cultural critique of the contemporary American society. Despite the general misconception about the genre that science fiction is a sub-culture, Phillip Dick`s original short story is not only closely following mainstream American literary tradition of the 1950s, but it can be interpreted as an allegory that specifically targeted the totalitarian social atmosphere of the McCarthy era.

The Location of Feminist Studies in English Literature : 브로드웨이의 나비들 , 할리우드의 애첩들 ; 지난 백년간 서구에 재현된 아시아 여성의 모습

우미성(Mi Seong Woo) 한국영미문학페미니즘학회 1999 Proceedings The First International Conference Vol.- No.-

자라지 않는 소녀, 젠더화된 순수성

우미성(Mi seong Woo) 한국영미문학교육학회 2014 영미문학교육 Vol.18 No.2

James Matthew Barrie, who is best known for his iconic play Peter Pan, wrote Mary Rose in the summer of 1919 with the similar motif of a child not growing up after her visits in an enchanted island. Mary Rose vanishes twice in her lifetime: As a girl about to enter puberty, she disappears from a Scottish island on her family holiday and comes back twenty days later, she disappears alone again from the same island on her trip with her husband, a few year's after her marriage, only to emerge twenty-five years later. The inexplicable experience leaves permanent scars in her childhood and adulthood as well as to her three-year-old son, Harry. Unlike Peter Pan and the lost boys who joyfully enjoy their adventure and eternal youth in the Never Land, her loss of time ultimately spoils Mary Rose's happiness, thus turning her into a sad lonely mother ghost waiting for her three-year old son, Harry. Her eternal youth confined her female body within the unnatural notion of childhood innocence and the forced denial of sexuality. Her absence also left her son motherless, causing a painful familial lack in Harry's life. Mary Rose is not just a ghost story largely overshadowed by the fame of Peter Pan, and the play portrays the European society in transition and changes from the traditional, pre-war Victorian age to the profoundly damaged world of post-war era. It provides its audience as well as the playwright Barrie himself with the collective and individual healing from the deeply embedded sense of loss.

프론티어 문학과 인종문제: 브렛 하트와 마크 트웨인의 희곡, 『Ah Sin』

우미성 ( Mi Seong Woo ) 한국아메리카학회 2003 美國學論集 Vol.35 No.3

19세기말 서구사회에 재현된 아시아 여성과 세기말적 이국정서: 피에르 로티의 『국화부인』

우미성 ( Mi Seong Woo ) 한국비교문학회 2014 比較文學 Vol.0 No.63

본 논문은 최초의 나비부인식 로맨스를 다룬 1887년 프랑스 소설, 피에르 로티의 『국화부인』에 드러난 세기말적 이국정서를 분석한다. 19세기말 유럽을 휩쓴 일본열풍과 이국적 낭만주의, 식민지 문학의 특징을 동시에 보여주는 로맨스 소설 『국화부인』은 1885년 나가사키에서 프랑스 해군으로 몇 달간 주둔했던 로티의 실제 경험에 바탕을 두고 쓰여진 기행문이자 자전적 소설이다. 일인칭 화자이자 저자인 로티가 이국적 공간과 일본여성에 대한 자세한 묘사를 시도함으로써 아시아문명에 대한 진정성있는 기행문이자 사실에 기반한 연애소설이라는 인상을 주지만 『국화부인』은 19세기말 억압적인 유럽사회를 탈피해 세기말적 욕망에 탐닉하면서 이성애적 낭만주의자로서의 이미지를 구현하기 위한 로티의 개별적인 정체성 탐색의 결과물이다. 도피주의적이고 개별적인 성적환상에 기인한 서양남성의 아시아여성 재현은 이후 단막극, 오페라, 영화, 뮤지컬 등 다양한 장르로 변형, 반복되면서 서구사회의 아시아 여성인식을 이국적인 타자로 고착화시키는 결과를 낳았다. This article is a study of the origin and the historical development of the Madame Butterfly narrative as the dominant representation of Asian women in Western culture, which was part of the cultural apparatus of nineteenth-century exoticism and fin-de-siecle. The popular Western opera`s favorite theme about the East, the interracial romance, found its origin in the French operas Lakme and Madame Chrysantheme. Pierre Loti`s romance novel, Madame Chrysantheme (1887), is the progenitor of the Butterfly narrative as it is a tragic romance between a white man and an Asian woman. Nominally, the center of the travelogue is a firsthand look at different people and customs. However, the reality of the Eastern locale did not concern Loti, who associated the exotic with escape, and this phenomenon applied to his racial and sexual preconceptions as well. In this regard, the real protagonist in Loti`s novels is himself, a man who uses Asian women as a means of self-aggrandizement. Several biographers and Loti scholars have written that the writer was a homosexual who perpetrated a heterosexual myth upon his reading public. Exotic writings, including Loti`s romance novels, were born as a revolt or as romantic and sexual escapism against the rigid state control and social anxiety at the turn of the twentieth century in Europe. The imaginary world of Loti`s male fantasy, intermingled with exoticism, has romanticized and mystified the Western view of East Asian countries as well as Asian women. It is historical irony and misfortune that one of the most enduring cultural images of Asian women in Western culture originated out of the wedlock of escapist sentiment of fin-de-siecle and exoticism.

19 세기 말 서양의 음악극이 그려낸 동양

우미성 한국연극학회 1999 한국연극학 Vol.13 No.1

Asia, or what the Western world preferred to call 'the Orient', has always been a popular theatrical topic in Europe and America since the 1850s. In both artistic and cultural spheres, the craze for things 'oriental' swept fashionable Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century, which reached its apogee in 1885 with the first commercially successful 'oriental show', The Mikado. As the traditional female shows such as burlesque and extravaganza were gradually marginalized since the 1870s as working-class entertainment, bourgeois theatres in urban areas catering mostly male dominated audience needed a new romantic subject as a replacement of 'low-other' of burlesque performers. Because of the contemporary European interest in colonial domination of non-European world, exoticism surfaced in the European mainstream culture such as musical comedies and operettas that fulfilled both the audiences aesthetic desires and class aspirations. The European theatre of the century entertained its male dominated audiences with melodramatic narratives in various musical forms, which confirmed and reaffirmed bourgeois heterosexual white male superiority. The Victorian Western audience understood Asia through theatrical representation, assuming the image on stage is based on the 'real'. Since the actual Asian body was absent on stage, Caucasian actors conveyed the image of 'Asianness' with exotic costumes and make-up, exaggerated postures and bodily movement, using props and artifacts often brought back from Asia. The humanity of Asian people was, thus, reduced to a sign, a sign of difference. A sketchy plot merely provided an excuse for songs and elaborate production numbers performed by beautiful chorus girls and specialty acts. In this representational format, various forms of musicals flourished in Europe and America without significant changes until the World War II. Throughout the history of Western theatre's staging of the East, the tendency of advanced and innovative stage technology with expectable storyline and stereotypical characterization pervaded since the second half of the nineteenth century to the present. The representation of the East was a product of intermingled exoticism, consumerism for cultural possession of the ancient civilization of Asia, and the myth of the Eastern culture associated with the wealth of sexual pleasure and mystery. In both the theatrical, and real world, the East served as the emblem of a deepening re-territorialization of Western desire. The study ends with an attempt to warn that the today's high-tech mainstream productions with melodramatic narratives rigidly bound in realism would further marginalize other experimental, subversive, deconstructive productions, concluding that Western theatre should free itself from the nostalgic recycle of the representational pattern so that theatre can become a site of building bridges between different groups of people or ideas and staging ever-changing reality of the global society.

근대 유럽문화에 재현된 '동양' : 동서양의 정체성에 관한 새로운 이해 가능성 A Comparative Assessment of the Eastern and Western Identities for Improved Understanding of the Two Cultures

유석호,김이섭,박기현,우미성 韓國比較文學會 2002 比較文學 Vol.29 No.-

This article is the result of an attempt to understand how Eastern culture had been introduced to the Western society during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The period has been characterized by remarkable advances in humanities as well as in science and technology in the European society, in other words, the age of modernity. More than any other productions, William Gilbert's 1885 production of 『The Mikado』 fueled Western theatre with its fascination by the East. Gilbert depicted the Japanese setting just as a safe backdrop to deliver his satire on English society. However, since 『The Mikado』 was the first "oriental" theme that the Savoy theatre put on stage, it was generally received as a genuine representation of the Japanese society. The comic opera manifests the ways Western theatre practitioners in the 1880s perceived Asia, and sets the tone for other "oriental" shows, making significant impact on the European public perspective of Asia in the late nineteenth century. Hermann Hesse's 『Siddhartha』 marks itself as the German writer's literary attempt to introduce religious and philosophical lessons of the East to the European public as an alternative concept to the crisis of the modern European society. The novel represents not only Hesse's own interpretation of the Eastern cultural text for the Western public, but his effort to find a transcendental synthetic proposition that breaks away from the binary opposition between mind and life. From Hesse's and other German philosophers' point of view, Eastern culture emerged as an escape from the limited knowledge and conditions of Europe toward experiencing a universal religion, true wisdom, and "transcendental self" in Jungian sense. Andre Malraux, having been influenced by Eastern philosophy and art as a young man, advocated for European public to reexamine their own cultural identity at the time of cultural crisis. His representation of the East was not without distortion and problems due to his lack of cultural experience and information. However, his affection and open-minded attitude toward Eastern culture broadened the scope of his knowledge. Art is, to Malraux, an act of endless quest for overcoming human conditions, and through his own endless quest, he found possibilities of new aesthetics and philosophy from the East.