TY - JOUR

T1 - Self-mockery of the Korean Wave (hallyu) in the Korean drama My Love from the Star and the role of the seventeenth century novel The Dream of the Nine Clouds

AU - Wall, Barbara

PY - 2016

Y1 - 2016

N2 - The fields of Korean classical literature and Korean TV drama do not often intermingle. Viewers of K-dramas can sometimes watch their protagonists thumb through certain books onstage, but these books are usually of foreign origin and do not belong to the so-called ‘canon’ of traditional Korean literature. As a covert parody of the The Dream of the Nine Clouds, My Love from the Star is an exception. It does not only explicitly allude to the novel, but shares semantic and structural parallels with it. In order to illuminate the intertextual references between the two works, I combine John Fiske’s concept of intertextuality with Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Parody. The tension between the novel and drama generates a dichotomy between tradition and hallyu that eventually leads to the self-mockery of hallyu itself. The fact that My Love from the Star was not widely recognized among hallyu fans as a parody of The Dream of the Nine Clouds might ironically support the drama’s mockery of the superficiality of hallyu. It might also prove that the pleasure viewers derive from a drama has less to do with the communication of meaning than with the way they are moved by it.

AB - The fields of Korean classical literature and Korean TV drama do not often intermingle. Viewers of K-dramas can sometimes watch their protagonists thumb through certain books onstage, but these books are usually of foreign origin and do not belong to the so-called ‘canon’ of traditional Korean literature. As a covert parody of the The Dream of the Nine Clouds, My Love from the Star is an exception. It does not only explicitly allude to the novel, but shares semantic and structural parallels with it. In order to illuminate the intertextual references between the two works, I combine John Fiske’s concept of intertextuality with Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Parody. The tension between the novel and drama generates a dichotomy between tradition and hallyu that eventually leads to the self-mockery of hallyu itself. The fact that My Love from the Star was not widely recognized among hallyu fans as a parody of The Dream of the Nine Clouds might ironically support the drama’s mockery of the superficiality of hallyu. It might also prove that the pleasure viewers derive from a drama has less to do with the communication of meaning than with the way they are moved by it.

UR - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17564905.2016.1171564

U2 - 10.1080/17564905.2016.1171564

DO - 10.1080/17564905.2016.1171564

M3 - Journal article

SP - 73

EP - 87

JO - Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema

JF - Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema

SN - 1756-4905

ER -