Foreign but Familiar

The global rise of the South Korean entertainment industry, commonly described as the Korean wave or hallyu, has been the subject of scholarly study because it presents a challenge to Western media hegemony. This chapter uses mixed methods to assess how hybridized genre conventions and familiar storytelling structures in South Korean television dramas create a media product that is accessible to a diverse fandom. The Korean drama fandom extends beyond Eastern Asia and the Asian diaspora, and there is a dearth of research on this larger global audience. Theories of cultural proximity are insufficient to explain a popularity that transcends culture and language. The importance of a media text's structure is also under-studied in research on fandom. By combining survey data from Korean drama fans living outside of South Korea with a critical assessment of the use of melodrama and other genre conventions in Korean dramas, this chapter argues that the shared symbolic language of genre plays an important role in building a global fanbase.

Zbrodnicze umysły i muzyczne harmonie. „Tajemnica Edwina Drooda” Charlesa Dickensa jako utwór protodetektywistyczny

The paper analyses the role of music in Dickens’ last, unfinished novel and its relation to the criminal puzzle which — for obvious reason — was left unsolved. Contrary to the traditional cultural associations (harmony, beauty, order), music in The Mystery of Edwin Drood is related to darkness, which shrouds the places where it is performed (the cathedral, Jasper’s room); it also functions as the background of various disharmonies (physical indisposition, quarrel, signs of hatred, fear). The theme of the only two religious songs that are referred to is sin and wickedness. On the one hand, considering the fact that music is John Jasper’s domain, the discordance not only functions as an “ethical metaphor” and externalization of the man’s character, but also points to him as the murderer of his nephew. On the other hand, the aforementioned songs foreground the motif of repentance or turning away from sin, which undermines the ostensibly obvious conclusions concerning Jasper’s guilt. Similarly to the detective novel of the (much later) Golden Age period, the hints prompting the puzzle’s solution are provided here, though they are not univocal, leaving a shadow of doubt as to the guilt of the most obvious suspect. Yet, contrary to the genre conventions, the clues appear mainly on the implied level of communication, available to the implied reader deciphering textual patterns and not merely “observing” the presented reality.

Detective Stories During Apartheid: H.I.E. Dhlomo as a Precursor of Drum

This article aims to contribute to the discussion of English-language crime fiction by black South African writers before 1994 by exploring H.I.E. Dhlomo’s relatively overlooked contribution to the genre in the first decade of apartheid. In particular, I intend to close read three detective stories written between the late 1940s and the early 1950s by Dhlomo, namely “Village Blacksmith Tragicomedy”, “Flowers”, and “Aversion to Snakes”, and compare them with the more celebrated stories published by Arthur Maimane in the popular magazine Drum a few years later. Notwithstanding their different re-elaboration of the tropes of crime fiction, I argue that both Dhlomo and Maimane resorted to this productive strand of popular literature to reassert a claim to knowledge denied to Africans, saturating their texts with new local meanings and exceeding Western genre conventions.

“Living Document”: From Documents to Documentality, from Mimesis to Performative Indexicality

In this article, in distinction to documentation as an epistemic understanding of documents, I will discuss the epistemology of documentality as an indexical theory of documental functions, which I will develop through Bruno Latour’s notion of information. This notion of indexicality is different than Suzanne Briet’s notion of indexicality (which I have discussed elsewhere (Briet, 2006)). I will begin this paper with an historical problem that illustrates the issues of viewing documents as content representation. This is the problem identified by Vincent Debaene (Debaene, 2014) in early and mid-twentieth century French field anthropology of the “two book” phenomenon, which attempted to address a perceived epistemic distance between lived experience and its representation through scientific documents. The solution to this problem of presence and representation was the writing and publication by French anthroplogists of a second, more literary, document after the production of the scientific paper or book, which supposedly represented the experience of the anthropologist and the group under study more fully. I will argue that both texts, however, followed genre conventions and practices, which are neither more or less faithful to an original experience. I will argue that the notion of an original experience reflected in the content of the text misses the performatively indexical relationship of text to world and the role that this plays in scientific and other forms of documentality. In short, what Vincent Debaene identified as the French anthropologists’ quest for producing a “living documents,” which closes the gap between life and documental representation, is a Quixotic task, since the problem is not real but rather is a product of the epistemology of re-presentation, which forecloses from our understanding what really happens with scientific and other documents.

A Never-Ending Masquerade: Luc Besson’s Fifth Element

This article shows Luc Besson’s Fifth Element as a hybrid fi lm, exploiting different genre formulas. Besson uses genre conventions as if they screened off the fi lm’s deep structure. Seemingly, the science fi ction formula determines its iconographic dimension. At the same time, melodrama is the principal hidden genre of Fifth Element. The main characters in the fi lm imitate typical heroes of science fi ction and action movies, and Besson gradually dismantles this camouflage.

"Bagatellen von - Beethoven?"

Beethoven's contemporaries perceived the association of "the celebrated hero in music" with the trivial piano genre of the bagatelle as a paradox. Subsequent generations felt even more provoked by the chronological proximity of Beethoven's Bagatelles opp. 119 and 126 with the enigmatic late chamber music works. This article proproses a new and broader perspective on the Bagatelles beyond the "purely musical" by focusing on genre conventions (brevity and stylistic variety) as well as compositional context and intentions (pedagogy and the formation of good taste), against the background of their precarious aesthetic evaluation. This attention to context automatically highlights a practice which accounted for the majority of piano compositions published in the early decades of the nineteenth century, but which today can be reconstructed only rudimentarily.

Translanguaging: A tool to decolonise students’ experiences of learning to write for academic purposes in the South African university context

University students can experience many challenges writing for academic purposes as they move from secondary to post-secondary studies. Both first and additional language users of English experience these challenges, resulting in universities across the globe instituting different modalities to help ease students’ transitions. In South African universities, despite English being the medium of instruction, most students are additional language speakers of English. This article discusses findings from a 2019 study that investigated three questions: 1) Do firstyear, additional language users of English choose to engage in translanguaging when presented with such an opportunity in their university courses? 2) If they choose to use this tool, how do they employ the genre conventions and discourse markers of the traditional academic essay? 3) What are their reactions to being presented with the opportunity to use translanguaging in their academic studies? The findings illustrate that approximately half of the study’s participants chose to employ translanguaging in their responses and were able to successfully use the genre conventions and discourse makers of the academic essay.

Hard Rock, Glam Rock, and Progressive Rock in the 1970s

This chapter places Queen within the network of the principal rock labels of the 1970s. Extending the work of classical and popular music analysts, a distinction is drawn between style and genre, as pertaining to replicated musical patterns and the cultural meanings afforded by such patterns, respectively. With this distinction in place, Queen’s 1970s outputs are analysed in relation to the style and genre conventions of hard rock, glam rock, and progressive rock. It is demonstrated that the band engaged the style conventions of the former and latter labels, but were positioned closer to glam rock in genre terms. This is evident through their subversive exaggerated articulation of hard and progressive rock style traits, with ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ encapsulating this relationship.