Sonja Häussler (Stockholm University)

Yi Munyǒl’s Our Twisted Hero and its film adaptation

Лекция пройдет на английском языке.

Дата и время: 06.04.2017, четверг, 16:00-17:30

Ауд. 175, Восточный ф-т, Университетская наб., 11 (2-й этаж)

The lecture is aimed at studying various strategies of transferring a literary source into the medium of a feature film. As samples, the lecturer will discuss Yi Munyǒl’s well-known novel Our Twisted Hero (1987) and its film adaptation (1992) produced by Park Chong-won, a prominent film director of Korean New Wave Cinema. In a narrow sense, Our Twisted Hero is a kind of growing-up novel with a few autobiographical features set on the backdrop of political changes in 1959-1960 South Korea. Depicting the microcosmos of a classroom, the novel allegorically relates to another important period in South Korea’s history, 1979-1980, and raises general questions of power struggle and abuse in society. In a broad sense, the novel can be interpreted as exploring the universal features of complicated power relationships between individuals.
The lecturer will analyze the novel’s plot and the author’s narrative techniques and compare them with those employed by the film director in his adaptation of the novel’s plot. Rather than focusing on the question of the film‘s faithfulness to the literary source, the lecturer will regard the two works of art as separate entities and study them by considering the specific narrative techniques of each medium, literature and film. In the final discussion, an attempt will be made to interpret the different artistic approaches of author and director.
 
The guest lecture serves as the starting point for a joint project on Korean literary works and their film adaptations which will be carried out by researchers of Saint Petersburg University and Stockholm University. It is sponsored by the AKS/KSPS Core University Program for Korean Studies granted to Saint Petersburg University.