On April 16, 2014, South Korea witnessed one of the worst tragedies in contemporary Korean history. A cruise boat named Sewol carrying 456 passengers—most of them teenage high school students on a field trip—sank into the sea, taking the lives of 304 persons. The nation saw aghast, on multiple media platforms, the abysmal failure of the authorities to rescue them. I analyze the movement that developed in its aftermath: how citizens started to claim their adulthood, united beyond exclusionary familism in sorrow over the failure to protect children who belonged to them all. I explain how they turned their personal grief into political solidarity and started to overcome the rugged individualism and self-reliance that had come to define citizenship in neoliberal Korea. Against the state’s injunction to forget and move on, citizens created memorials and refused to accept the dominant narrative that the authorities had done their best to rescue the children and meticulously started to examine televisual and other records of that day. By their very nature, as public and personal records, these artifacts of memory-keeping are across media and art forms. I do close readings of fiction and documentary films, explore the 24/7 nature of live broadcasts, and analyze artistic responses such as memorial sites, literature, paintings, and sculptures to find in all of them, a deeply felt crisis triggered by the death of children. I find in these collective efforts what I describe as “suspended mourning,” a resolve to suspend the emotional state of grief in search of answers to the reasons not just for the incident but the deep-seated propensity toward obedience ingrained in South Korean upbringing itself. I argue that the catastrophe finally severed the emotional bonds many had with President Park Geun-hye, the daughter of the military dictator Park Jung-hee, who is widely recognized as the father of Korean modernization. The “orphan of the nation,” as Park Geun-hye was referred to, lost the public leniency she had enjoyed until then. It eventually led to the Candlelight Revolution three years later, leading to her impeachment.

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Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston University / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis or dissertation. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / From the very start of its missionary activity, Protestantism by historical accident coincided with the opening of the Korean nation and subsequent culture contact with the West and social change. Thus, it is nuclear to this dissertation to analyze causally the involvement of Protestantism in the inceptive process of the formation of modern Korea and to study the dynamics and nature of their contact through tracing specifically the influence of Protestantism. Attention is focused on finding out how heterogeneous elements, Protestantism which came to Korea in the same package with Western capitalism, technology, and other phases of Western civilization came to face things Korean. The nature and process of the contact and the extent and direction of mutual accommodation during the inceptive stage of the formation of modern Korea are examined [TRUNCATED]. / 2999-01-01

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(česky) The thesis introduces traditional Korean game of paduk, it concerns at its rules, history and nowadays situation with all the players organizations and developement of paduk in Korea and internationally as well. Paduk rules are explained in the first part which follows by the list of the most important and necessary technical and theoretical terms. The next part describes basic strategy and flow of the game, visual demonstrations are included. In the part of Korean historical developement the thesis describes the import to Korean Peninsula and its development in all the historical parts of Korean history from the Three kingdoms to the modern age. There is a special attention on the transformation of the game in the Colonial period (1910 - 1945). During this time the traditional Korean version of the game was left and forgotten, or forced to be forgotten and players have been playing the modern version since then. The modern paduk is shown with foundations of paduk organizations, story of famous masters and the characteristic of Korean paduk in the international field. The focus is also on the almost unknown situation of paduk in DPRK and how it stands in the its society. The conclusion summarizes the basic characteristic of distinctive aspects of Korean paduk (especially in the...

This thesis is motivated by a lack of studies on the history of mental illness in South Korea. It builds upon existing studies by historians Theodore Yoo and Bang Hyun Lee, who have also used newspapers to analyze the discourse surrounding mental illness during Colonial Korea (1910-1945). Specifically, I analyze newspapers in the decades following this period to revisit three themes that both Yoo and Lee noted about the colonial period: (1) the religious practice of hitting individuals with mental illnesses, (2) the strong support for the sterilization of people with mental illnesses, and (3) the association between crime and mental illness. Because the colonial period was when people with mental illnesses were increasingly treated as social outcasts, comparing shifts or continuances from the colonial period was useful in exploring the stigma attached to mental illness in Korea. The articles surrounding the first theme revealed that despite the stigma attached to Shamanistic practices of beating during the colonial period due to a growing biomedical understanding of mental illness, they surprisingly persisted. There were also new developments, in which people with mental illnesses were beaten, chained, and isolated in “treatment” institutions across the nation for no particular reason. Articles surrounding the second theme showed that though inflamed rhetoric surrounding sterilization operations were not found post-1950, rhetoric with eugenics undertones lingered. Newspapers reported on these inhumane practices until as late as 1999. For the third theme, this study finds that the press continued to strongly associate mental illness with crime. These associations that effectively equated individuals with mental illnesses to criminals still frequently occur in newspapers today, particularly with what the media calls “Don’t Ask” crimes. Based on these findings, this study discovers that the negative treatment and perception of people with mental illnesses persisted long beyond Colonial Korea. It also stresses the importance of examining the role the press plays in contributing to the stigma attached to mental illness and shaping the way mental illness is understood.

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This dissertation examines the discursive production of mudang, also known as shamans, during the late Chosŏn Dynasty (eighteenth to nineteenth-centuries) and during the Japanese colonial period in Korea (1910-1945). The many discursive sites on mudang articulated various types of difference, often based on gender and urban/rural divides. This dissertation explores four bodies of work: eighteenth to nineteenth-century neo-Confucian reformist essays, late nineteenth-century western surveys of Korea, early twentieth-century newspapers and journals, and early ethnographic studies. The mudang was used throughout this period to reinforce gendered distinctions, prescribe spatial hierarchies, and promote capitalist modernity. In particular, institutional developments in shamanism studies under colonial rule, coupled with an expanded print media critique against mudang, signalled the needs and desires to pronounce a distinct indigenous identity under foreign rule. Chapter One traces three pre-colonial discursive developments, Russian research on Siberian shamanism under Catherine the Great, neo-Confucian writings on "mudang," and Claude Charles Dallet’s late nineteenth-century survey of Korean indigenous practices. Chapter Two examines the last decade of the nineteenth-century, studying the simultaneous emergence of Isabella Bird Bishop’s expanded discussion on Korean shamanism alongside early Korean newspapers’ social criticisms of mudang. Chapter Three looks at Korean newspapers and journals as the source and product of an urban discourse from 1920-1940. Chapter Four examines the same print media to consider why mudang were contrasted from women as ethical household consumers and scientific homemakers. Chapter Five looks at Ch’oe Nam-sŏn and Yi Nŭng-hwa’s 1927 treatises on Korean shamanism as a celebration of ethnic identity which became a form of intervention in an environment where Korean shamanism was used to justify colonial rule.

This dissertation examines the discursive production of mudang, also known as shamans, during the late Chosŏn Dynasty (eighteenth to nineteenth-centuries) and during the Japanese colonial period in Korea (1910-1945). The many discursive sites on mudang articulated various types of difference, often based on gender and urban/rural divides. This dissertation explores four bodies of work: eighteenth to nineteenth-century neo-Confucian reformist essays, late nineteenth-century western surveys of Korea, early twentieth-century newspapers and journals, and early ethnographic studies. The mudang was used throughout this period to reinforce gendered distinctions, prescribe spatial hierarchies, and promote capitalist modernity. In particular, institutional developments in shamanism studies under colonial rule, coupled with an expanded print media critique against mudang, signalled the needs and desires to pronounce a distinct indigenous identity under foreign rule. Chapter one traces three pre-colonial discursive developments, Russian research on Siberian shamanism under Catherine the Great, neo-Confucian writings on "mudang," and Claude Charles Dallet’s late nineteenth-century survey of Korean indigenous practices. Chapter Two examines the last decade of the nineteenth-century, studying the simultaneous emergence of Isabella Bird Bishop’s expanded discussion on Korean shamanism alongside early Korean newspapers’ social criticisms of mudang. Chapter Three looks at Korean newspapers and journals as the source and product of an urban discourse from 1920-1940. Chapter Four examines the same print media to consider why mudang were contrasted from women as ethical household consumers and scientific homemakers. Chapter Five looks at Ch’oe Nam-sŏn and Yi Nŭng-hwa’s 1927 treatises on Korean shamanism as a celebration of ethnic identity which became a form of intervention in an environment where Korean shamanism was used to justify colonial rule.

This dissertation examines the discursive production of mudang, also known as shamans, during the late Chosŏn Dynasty (eighteenth to nineteenth-centuries) and during the Japanese colonial period in Korea (1910-1945). The many discursive sites on mudang articulated various types of difference, often based on gender and urban/rural divides. This dissertation explores four bodies of work: eighteenth to nineteenth-century neo-Confucian reformist essays, late nineteenth-century western surveys of Korea, early twentieth-century newspapers and journals, and early ethnographic studies. The mudang was used throughout this period to reinforce gendered distinctions, prescribe spatial hierarchies, and promote capitalist modernity. In particular, institutional developments in shamanism studies under colonial rule, coupled with an expanded print media critique against mudang, signalled the needs and desires to pronounce a distinct indigenous identity under foreign rule. Chapter one traces three pre-colonial discursive developments, Russian research on Siberian shamanism under Catherine the Great, neo-Confucian writings on "mudang," and Claude Charles Dallet’s late nineteenth-century survey of Korean indigenous practices. Chapter Two examines the last decade of the nineteenth-century, studying the simultaneous emergence of Isabella Bird Bishop’s expanded discussion on Korean shamanism alongside early Korean newspapers’ social criticisms of mudang. Chapter Three looks at Korean newspapers and journals as the source and product of an urban discourse from 1920-1940. Chapter Four examines the same print media to consider why mudang were contrasted from women as ethical household consumers and scientific homemakers. Chapter Five looks at Ch’oe Nam-sŏn and Yi Nŭng-hwa’s 1927 treatises on Korean shamanism as a celebration of ethnic identity which became a form of intervention in an environment where Korean shamanism was used to justify colonial rule.