Speak Memory! Morae Sigye and the Politics of Social Melodrama in Contemporary South Korea

Abstract

This article is composed of two parts. The first part presents a brief survey of cinematic and television melodramas in South Korea and describes how melodrama has unevenly reflected a range of socio-cultural transformations. It traces the ways melodrama has embodied the changing social and gender norms against the backdrop of highly compressed modernization and the persistent patriarchal authority in South Korea. The second part analyzes various textual strategies in Morae Sigye as a social melodrama by examining the generic specificity and radical differences seen in Morae Sigye versus mainstream television dramas. In particular, this article assesses Morae Sigye’s representation of actual historical events and its pedagogical usefulness as a vehicle of cultural remembering. The article as a whole explores the potential of social melodrama as a useful televisual subgenre that can articulate melodramatic pathos with desire to summon popular memory surrounding the traumatic historical events in the past.

Keywords

social melodrama politics of memory representation of history

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