ABSTRACT

This paper presents a theoretical introduction to efficiently discuss the fantastic narrative of South Korea, which has made explosive growth in the paradigm of digital informatization since the 1990s. As it is well-known, the fantasy genre did not develop years after the onset of modern times in South Korea, which led to the sporadic production of horror and SF works. It was only in the 1990s that fantasy works started to be produced. In the 1990s, the digital technology to neutralize and standardize all the media became universal and resulted in the information revolution across the globe. During the decade, the deconstruction of the old analogue boundaries gained momentum. The Cold War structure, which dominated the world for approximately 40 years, broke down, thus facilitating those changes further. Those circumstances of the world had huge impacts on the society and culture of South Korea as well as its politics and economy, creating an opportunity to doubt the old dichotomous boundaries across all the aspects. One of the resulting changes was the fantasy genre taking root during the period as it was on the premise of reality and unreality and also existence and apparition. Entering the 2000s, "the Fantastic Narrative" was created across many different media including novels, movies, cartoons, and dramas with frequent content exchanges and migrations between the media. In spite of those developments, however, the discussions about ‘the fantastic Narrative Genre’ have been separate among the media with the definitions of fantasy-related concepts depending on the journalism convention or borrowing from the Western literary theories conveniently. The journalistic terms are fluid, and the literary theories that have been borrowed from the West have many lacking aspects to explain the Fantastic Narrative Works of South Korea within the framework of East Asian narrative tradition. They also have limitations with explaining the current narrative situation, in which the letters, images, and sounds are neutralized based on digital with the different forms of content being combined and intersected each other with no boundaries between the media. This study thus set out to devise an integrated framework of the fantastic narrative genre with which to discuss both the letter and image narratives in the historical context of South Korean fantasy narrative and build a foundation for research on the fantasy genre of South Korea during the digital era. The study first reviewed previous discussions about the fantastic narrative with a focus on literature representing the letter narrative and movies and dramas representing the image narrative. Focusing on the concepts and requirements of the fantastic narrative repeated used in the previous discussions, the investigator identified "representative visibility" and "essential conductivity" as the common denominators of the fantastic narrative. With the two elements as the minimum coordinates, the investigator also identified the categories and types of the fantastic narrative genre by taking into account the context in which the concept of ‘the Fantastic’ was formed both in East and West and the differences and contexts of ‘the Fantastic’ discourse from the pre-modern times to the modern times. ‘The fantastic narrative’ refers to the stories that depict unrealistic events, which cannot be explained with the familiar laws of the world, from the beginning to the end. When cultural products have such a type of stories, they are called ‘the fantastic narrative works’. the fantastic narrative undergoes stereotyping according the location of space where events take place, relations between the stories and readers, and the connections between the stories and reality. Further stereotyping can be possible according to the media of representation and conventional genre classification. The sub-types, however, do not belong to the upper-types exclusively. In today's era of digital multimedia, the media of representation can be fused together to no limits with the conventional genres being fluid and hybrid, which raises a need to leave the system open. Performing those operations, the investigator was able to witness the dynamics of current culture that cannot be embraced with the old theories of the fantastic literature and felt a need for theoretical works to make flexible reactions to such cultural situations. Such attempts as the present study will hopefully make a contribution to the map of fantasy narrative genre in South Korea and provide a reference framework to understand the current state of culture.

KEYWORD

the Fantastic Narrative Genre, Horror, SF(Science Fiction), Fantasy, Adventure, AH(Alternate History)

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