A Study on the Social Commentary of Byun Young-joo Films

2019 ◽  
Vol 40 ◽  
pp. 236-275
Author(s):  
Jeong Yun An ◽  
Chung Beom Ham
Keyword(s):  
Born to Write ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 181-183
Author(s):  
Neil Kenny

At the same time as composing, editing, translating works and getting them published, producers of family literature commented on how the works inflected, and were inflected by, the social status of the families from which they emanated. In other words, the process of producing family literature included social commentary on that process. Some of these commentators went a step further. Attempting to take an overview of the field of literary and learned production in France, they highlighted the role within it of families; and they viewed that role through the lens of social hierarchy. The two writers who did this more than any others were François Grudé de la Croix du Maine and Scévole de Sainte-Marthe, to whom Chapters 13 and 14 are devoted, respectively.


2020 ◽  
pp. 41-50
Author(s):  
Eugenio Ercolani ◽  
Marcus Stiglegger

This chapter analyses the masculinity present in Cruising and the subculture it sets out to describe: the communication codes, the language, and the near total absence of women. It taps into the social commentary Friedkin attempts to lay out regarding male sexuality and how it is externalized depending on context. Particular attention is given to Steve Burns and the plethora of men with whom he interacts. The chapter also focuses on the only fully fleshed-out female character present in the film, played by actress Karen Allen, whose career is taken into account and analysed.


2005 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 239-252 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Meyer

WHEN SIKES AND NANCY RECAPTURE OLIVER, in Dickens'sOliver Twist, intending to return him to the gang of thieves, Sikes warns Oliver against crying out to passersby, announcing that his dog will go for Oliver's throat if he so much as speaks one word. Looking at the dog, who is eyeing Oliver and growling and licking his lips, “with a kind of grim and ferocious approval,” Sikes tells Oliver, “He's as willing as a Christian, strike me blind if he isn't!” (109; ch. 16). Sikes of course simply intends to say that his dog is as good as human, but Dickens's joke, in the context of the novel, is a chilling one. Sikes's bloodthirsty dogisas willing as the novel has shown many a professed Christian to be to exercise brute power over the weak and helpless, to drive Oliver into a life of crime, and to commit physical violence against him. In the course of the novel, Dickens shows what professed Christians have been willing to do to the poor and invites his readers to contemplate what they as Christians should instead be willing to do.Oliver Twistis of course deeply concerned with the condition of England's poor, and Dickens invokes the idea of Christianity as a rhetorical tool through which to make the social commentary that is at the novel's moral center.


Author(s):  
Sophia R. Mager

In this research paper, I examine how Jordan Peele’s film Us (2019) fits into the genre of a modern “Black Gothic.” I analyze how Peele uses imagery, character construction, and social references to construct a modern Black Gothic film that considers the intense history of oppression and silencing of groups on the basis of their race and class in the United States. I use the foundational definitions and examples provided by Maisha Wester and Sheri-Marie Harrison to argue how Us fits into and further modernizes the Black Gothic genre, as well as examining how Peele’s imagery contributes to the horror and the social commentary of the film. Ultimately, this paper provides a close reading of the whole film as a part of a larger conversation around how the historical and modern oppression of Black individuals and communities is embedded into the very foundation of the United States as a nation.


Author(s):  
Catherine J. Golden

Beginning in April 1836 and concluding with a double number in November 1837, Charles Dickens’s The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club—a sequence of comic adventures with caricature-style illustrations initially by Robert Seymour and subsequently by Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz)—came out in nineteen illustrated instalments for the cost of a shilling each. An unprecedented publishing phenomenon, Pickwick Papers attracted fans across the social classes, generated a host of Pickwick-related products, and earned glowing reviews. “The Pickwick Papers and the Rise of the Serial” offers a synthetic reading of reviews by Dickens’s contemporaries and work by past and recent critics who have acknowledged Pickwick’s importance to the rise of the illustrated serial. Chapter one examines interwoven factors that contributed to Pickwick’s popularity, including the growth of commodity culture, a rise in literacy, new printing technologies, serialization, and the appeal of reading pictures, particularly humorous ones. The blend of comic appeal, theatricality, and social commentary led to the serial’s success, and, in the process, created a mass market for new fiction with illustration.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 20
Author(s):  
Sean Brayton

This paper examines the critical potential and pedagogic possibilities of the workplace television comedy during the COVID-19 pandemic. It is particularly interested in Greg Daniels’ Upload, a series that debuted during the first wave of infections in North America. Although it was produced before the current health crisis, Upload offers a prescient social commentary on the depravities of late capitalism, one that speaks to present concerns over access to vital health resources and the importance of “essential” workers, specifically in the service industry. However, Upload is driven by a liberal version of multiculturalism that emphasizes racial equality and ostensibly recognizes “difference” but downplays economic disparities and racial divisions of labor even as it draws on them repeatedly in its critique of inequality. Whereas the series effectively challenges the monetization of everyday life and death, a point of praise for many critics, it fails to disrupt or even call attention to how low-wage and purportedly low-skilled work is currently and historically racialized in the US. As a result, Upload’s efficacy as a social commentary and indictment of late capitalism is more interested in the unequal distribution of essential resources and services than the political economy of their provision, that is, the social relations of their production.


Author(s):  
Emerson Richards

This paper compares and analyses the differences between Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955) and filmic versions by Stanley Kubrick (1962) and Adrian Lyne (1994), focusing on the respective characterisations of Clare Quilty, as mediated through his encounter with Humbert Humbert at a pivotal scene at the Enchanted Hunter’s Lodge. Following an in-depth analysis of the scene in question, the article then examines Kubrick’s Lolita, exploring the homosocial undertones of Peter Sellers’s Quilty, and the attendant commentary on heteronormative culture of late 1950s/early 1960s America. Finally, Lyne’s interpretation of this encounter will be analysed to discern how a menacing Quilty alters the narrative and deviates from the previous representations, updating the social commentary to incorporate a distinctly 1990s milieu in the process. Treating the two films as iterations and/or mutations of the original literature, the article proposes a comparatist-driven analysis to discern each artist’s intentions toward the narrative as exemplified by this crucial meeting of minds.


2011 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 237-251
Author(s):  
LESLIE BUTLER

In the winter of 1859, the Boston poet Julia Ward Howe sailed for Cuba; and in the winter of 1860, Ticknor and Fields published an account of her travel.A Trip to Cubaappeared only months after the same firm had published Richard Henry Dana's story of his “vacation voyage,”To Cuba and Back. These two narratives responded to a burgeoning American interest in the Caribbean island that promised recuperation to American invalids and adventure for military “filibusters.” Howe's narrative demonstrated a self-conscious familiarity with antebellum travel writing more broadly, however, as she playfully resisted yet ultimately upheld various conventions of a genre that had become a staple of the American literary marketplace. “I do not know why all celebrated people who write books of travel begin by describing their days of seasickness,” she noted, before discussing her own shipboard illness. She followed similar cues as she blended elements of autobiography, the social sketch, nature writing, and political and social commentary. Across 250 “sprightly” pages, readers were offered a familiar melange of humorous portraits, detailed descriptions of “foreign” institutions, and extensive commentary on local customs and social mores.


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