Title: Refunctioning a Hybrid Genre: Representation of the Filipino-Korean in Korean Hallyu Cinema

Speaker: Dr. Maria Luisa T. Reyes, Professor, Department of Literature, University of Santo Tomas

Date & Time: November 19th (Mon.) 2018, 12:00 – 14:00

Place: Tonan-tei (Room no. 201) on the second floor of Inamori
Foundation Memorial Building, CSEAS, Kyoto University

Moderator: Prof. Hau Caroline, CSEAS

Abstract:
The paper explores ways in which the contemporary refunctioning of
classical literary and cinematic genres might continue to provide
vitality and relevance in building multi-faceted border-crossing
societies such as multicultural communities. In the case of Korean
hallyu cinema, Punch, the sleeper-hit film of 2011 about a
Korean-Filipino character (“Kopino”), the “coming-of-age” genre is
located at the nexus between the key features of the Bildungsroman and
the project of multiculturalism in dominantly monocultural Korea. In the
process of refunctioning, the aesthetics of the film is reworked from a
narrative structured by the integrative logic of an individual’s
development (Bildungsroman) into a political site for negotiation of
contentious tensions across cultures (multiculturalism). As a “hybrid”
Korean film characteristic of many products of the popular Korean
culture industry, at its contact zone is the Kopino, the main
protagonist, Wan-deuk, in which the structure of the Bildungsroman the
Korean han and the Filipino affect sana become resilient and dynamic if
not always visible features that textually coalesce and collide in the
process of “generic translocality,” multiplying the tensions and
reframing the narrative structure itself. The result is the emergence of
a refunctioned hybrid genre toward what might be called the
“multicultural Bildungsroman.”

About the speaker:
Maria Luisa Torres Reyes is Full Professor, and Scholar-in-Residence at
the University of Santo Tomas (UST), founded in 1611. She is also the
Editor-in-Chief of UST’s journal, UNITAS, the oldest extant
multidisciplinary journal in the Philippines, established in 1922. She
is founding editor and editor emerita of the widely indexed
international journal on literary and cultural studies, Kritika Kultura,
published by the Ateneo de Manila University, where she taught for many
years. She is author of Banaag at Sikat (2010), the award-winning book
on the history of literary criticism and commentary on, perhaps, the
first “socialist” novel in Asia by Lope K. Santos, published by the
National Commission for Culture and the Arts, and SipatSalin (2012), a
collection of her poems and their translations in various foreign and
local languages. In her international scholarly publications, her
interests include the exploration of the ways in which “Western” ideas
and literary and critical categories (e.g. the theories of Bertolt
Brecht), have been transformed and “refunctioned” in the Philippines and
other non-Western contexts.