Found on the Web #25 – Factory Girls, LKL on Buckwheat, and NSFW

Sticky Stuff

Found on the Web

This notice for an upcoming event is probably not as useful as the book the event is focusing on.

Factory Girl Literature: Sexuality, Violence and Representation in Industrializing Korea – Presentation by Ruth Barraclough.

Korea’s twentieth-century industrialization saw millions of women and girls leave country towns to generate a series of manufacturing booms. Ruth Barracloght will discuss Korean industrial literature to show how the factory girl became an archetypal figure, travelling across time and genres from the 1920s to the 1990s. Combining in her person a compelling mix of sexual vulnerability and political potential, the factory girl became a crucial figure in modern Korean literature for the way she embodied the violence of industrial life.
Ruth Barraclough is Assistant Professor in Korean Studies and Gender and Cultural Studies at the Australian National University. Her book Factory Girl Literature: Sexuality, Violence and Representation in Industrialising Korea, has just been published by University of California Press.

 

Over at our old buddies at London Korean Links, Philip Gowman notes that the classic Korean story “When Buckwheat Blossoms Bloom”is getting what he calls the “Green Days treatment.”

One of Korea’s most famous short stories, Lee Hyo-seok’s Buckwheat Season / When Buckwheat Flowers Bloom (메밀꽃 필 무렵, 1936) is to be brought to the cinema by the creators of Green Days (Korean title 소중한 날의 꿈, 2010).

Although Buckwheat Season has found its way into the hearts of Koreans and is one of the most translated Korean short stories, LKL on first reading found it hard to “get”

But An Jae-hoon and Han Hye-jin did such a good job of Green Days that I’m hoping their half-hour animation will provide some of that “Korean context”, showing what a Korean finds so touching about the story.

There is much more to the review than just that, so check it out!

Finally, in a random moment of checking Korean spelling on Bing, I came across this, the veracity of which I cannot vouch for!