The University of Pittsburgh's Asian Studies Center will present We Jung Yi and her talk "The Pleasure of Mourning: Korean War Blockbusters in Post-Cold War South Korea" as the next installment of its Asia on Screen series on November 19.WE JUNG YI is Assistant Professor of Asian Studies and Comparative Literature at the Pennsylvania State University. Her book manuscript, entitled Remembering the Unfinished War: Literature, Film, and the Politics of Mourning in South Korea, engages with the cultural turn in Korean literary studies by tracing historical and aesthetic connections among diverse forms of Korean War memories. She is the author of “Between Longing and Belonging: Diasporic Return in Contemporary South Korean Cinema,” collected in Cinematic Homecomings: Exile and Return in Transnational Cinema (Bloomsbury, 2014).And a description from the Pitt International Week website:
We Jung Yi's talk traces the ways in which the Korean War blockbuster has emerged as a form of remembering the unfinished war on the Korean peninsula, in tandem with neoliberal globalization in South Korea. She will review three Korean War blockbusters as works of mourning in transition and translation: Joint Security Area, Taegukgi, and Welcome to Dongmakgol. Her analysis focuses on how their spectacle-charged forms affectively move their audiences to engage with the traumatic legacy of their nation.The talk begins at 3:00 in 4130 Posvar Hall (map), and is free and open to the public.