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Since 2020, South Korean spirituality has increasingly featured in a variety of television genres. The global appeal of K-dramas has the potential to turn mudang 巫堂 (shaman) into K-shamans, in the process creating idealized global spiritual leaders. This process is facilitated by the creation of trust in mudang, a trust fostered through specific cinematic features and narrative structures. Many recent television representations depict mudang as well-rounded characters with daily lives, family issues, and personal struggles. They are figures with whom the audience can sympathize and whom they can understand and even admire. This is in contrast to earlier media depictions of them as flat characters who perform bizarre rituals that affect the other characters in negative ways. Their spiritual work is now depicted in such a way as to enhance public trust in this tradition. Moreover, recent Korean television dramas have created trust in musok 巫俗 (shamanism) practices by featuring both authentic and fake mudang in parallel. In so doing, the dramas show that mudang work to appease angry spirits and alleviate human suffering resulting from supernatural forces. Such mainstreaming of musok positions the once stigmatized practice at the heart of Korea’s cultural identity. This article focuses on close reading of specific scenes from recent K-dramas.

This article examines the way in which Korean literary works from the 2000s represent women who deviate from the normative family structure, and argues that these representations signal the potential of 2000s Korean literature to serve as a bridge to the feminist literary turn of the 2010s. Through an analysis of Talk’omhan na ŭi tosi (My sweet city, 2006), Chŭlgŏun na ŭi chip (Home sweet home, 2007), and Pyŏl i ch’ongch’ong han ŏndŏk (A starry hill, 2007), this article explores how the female characters deal with the family norms and gendered roles prescribed for them. In doing this, it identifies a progression from frustration, through realization (disillusionment), to the crossing of normative boundaries. Although the characters attempt to resist family norms and depart from normative family ideology, they also exhibit constant hesitations to fully transgress the norms, resulting in a process of negotiation of these norms. I argue that such tensions reveal how literature in the 2000s paved the way for subsequent literary discourse on gender and family in the 2010s, a time when feminist and other marginalized voices began to make themselves heard.

This article examines how chang 瘴 or “miasma,” functioned as both a medical term and a cultural–spatial idiom. Existing scholarship has largely treated chang (C. zhang) either through retrospective diagnosis or through the south–oriented disease geography of imperial China. By drawing on medical compilations, official records, collected works, and geographic writings, this article shows how chang gradually became a versatile and usable concept. Rather than treating chang as a simple borrowing from the south of China, this article argues that the concept, though derived from Chinese regional and climatological discourses, was reconstructed within the Korean context. This process unfolded even as medical and literary texts continued to preserve inherited southern etiological templates. Over time, miasma attribution shifted from a broad southern orientation to more explicit administrative enumeration and, when it comes to late Chosŏn, to a stronger association with the southern maritime fringe. Miasmatic lands (changji 瘴地) should be understood not as an environmental condition but as a historically produced designation shaped by knowledge circulation, governance, and embodied movement.

Western academia has often overlooked Asian interpretations of Shakespearean plays, largely due to the misconception that Asian theater arts—characterized by their focus on corporeal and expressionistic aesthetics—are fundamentally incompatible with Shakespeare’s language-focused works. As a result, Western critics frequently fail to engage with or understand Asian Shakespeare productions. This paper challenges such simplistic evaluations by arguing that they stem from a lack of engagement with the languages and cultural contexts through which Asian theater companies reinterpret and present Shakespeare. The study begins by investigating the history of Asian Shakespearean productions and their neglect by Euro-American scholars. It then analyzes Brian Byungkoo Ahn’s Hamyŏl/Haemnit, a Korean adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which integrates the tragic modern history of Korea and Buddhist perspectives on life, death, and the afterlife. To fully understand these intercultural meanings and the reinterpretation of Hamlet, one requires a grasp of the Korean language. The paper further examines the language of Hamyŏl/Haemnit, demonstrating how this adaptation offers a genuinely valuable intercultural reinterpretation. On the basis of this, the paper argues that language is crucial in Asian Shakespeare productions in general and suggests that Hamyŏl/Haemnit has contributed to a richer, more nuanced understanding of Shakespeare’s works through its incorporation of Korean cultural and linguistic elements.

Kim Kijin 金基鎭 (1903–85) was a literary critic, writer, and poet who had a formative influence on leftist literary culture in colonial Korea. He was a founding member of the Chosŏn P’ŭrollet’aria Yesulga Tongmaeng 朝鮮프롤레타리아藝術家同盟 (Korean Artist Proletarian Federation, hereafter KAPF), a socialist literary group formed in 1925 that, until its disbandment in 1935, was the main leftist cultural organization in Korea. In 1924 in the magazine Kaebyŏk 開闢 (Creation), he published “Pulgŭn chwi” (붉은 쥐, Red rat), 1 inaugurating an early phase of KAPF literature called Sin kyŏnghyangp’a munhak 新傾向派 文學 (New tendency literature).2 Characterized by sensationalism and grotesque imagery, New Tendency literature brought to readers’ attention the oppressive conditions of capitalist exploitation and was heralded by leftist critics as the first step toward a genuinely proletarian literature.3 The protagonist of the story, Pak Hyŏngjun, is a penniless intellectual who, discontent with the world around him, longs for an ideal world of his imagination, which appears to him more real than reality itself. Over the course of the story, he comes to abandon his escapist fantasy and confront his sordid reality. When he stumbles upon a bloody rat on the street, he realizes that he must do whatever it takes to survive, like the thieving rat. Following the law of the rat, he steals from a grocery store and is hit by a firetruck during the ensuing police chase. The story ends with a graphic description of his mutilated body, sprawled on the street like the titular red rat.