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The new wave of Korean cinema has presented a series of distinct genre productions, which are influenced by contemporary Japanese horror cinema and traditions of the Gothic. Ahn Byeong-ki is one of Korea‘s most notable horror film directors, having made four Gothic horrors between 2000 and 2006. These transnational horrors, tales of possession and avenging forces, have repeatedly been drawn to issues of modernity, loneliness, identity, gender, and suicide. Focusing on the figure of the ghostly woman, and the horrors of modern city life in Korea, this essay considers the style of filmmaking employed by Ahn Byeong-ki in depicting, in particular, the Gothic revelation.
This article reviews the exhibition _Gothic: Dark Glamour_, held at the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York, September 5 2008 – February 21 2009. It also considers the eponymous volume published alongside the exhibition by Valerie Steele and Jennifer Park. The exhibition was the first of international significance to identify and explore the influence of Gothic on contemporary fashion by both major label designers and small subcultural producers. The article hails the exhibition as a landmark event and investigates the various Gothic/fashion narratives it,puts forward, including veiling motifs, subcultural style, grotesque and perverse bodies, and the prevalence of British and Japanese design. The article concludes that the exhibition marks a moment in the glamorisation of the Gothic, in which it moves from being a minority to a mainstream interest.
204 The arts of Angela Carter Performance and puppet theatre in Angela Carter’s Japan 10 The ‘art of faking’: performance and puppet theatre in Angela Carter’s Japan Helen Snaith O n 26 March 1969 Angela Carter received the news that she had been awarded the five hundred pound Somerset Maugham Travel Award for her novel, Several Perceptions, published in the previous year. Carter used the money to travel to America with her thenhusband, Paul Carter, before embarking upon her sojourn to Japan alone. Reflecting on Carter’s time abroad Sarah Gamble remarks
The Japanese playwright and novelist Izumi Kyōka (1873–1939) was a fearful man. His fear was dual in nature: both horror and reverence. Without the latter, he would have been no more impressive than Edgar Allan Poe, whose ‘The Tell-tale Heart’ ( 1843 ) takes us to a dark place (which is interesting) and leaves us there (which is not). Both writers were at times histrionic
and books appearing on new national and regional gothics, from Kiwi gothic to Florida gothic, Barcelona gothic to Japanese gothic, the wider context for this had not really been addressed. What were the conditions that had produced such a proliferation of gothics and what were the general implications of this proliferation for what the West had previously understood as ‘Gothic’? There was also
In Hamlet , Ophelia has nothing to do with the supernatural. She is not a witch, fairy or deity; nor does she return to life as a zombie or a ghost for revenge, in spite of the mistreatment and injustice she suffered in life. But in her afterlives in Japanese popular culture Ophelia has metamorphosed into a supernatural woman in various forms, such as a powerful sea goddess, a guardian of the tree of life and a grim reaper. This chapter explores these various afterlives, and contextualises Ophelia's metamorphosis from an innocent victim
The portrayal of Japan as ‘the nation of suicide’ is pervasive. In 1897, Émile Durkheim famously proclaimed that ‘the readiness of the Japanese to disembowel themselves for the slightest reason is well known’, 1 echoing the bushido tenet that ‘the Way of the Samurai is found in death’. 2 The notion of suicide as an attribute of manliness is inscribed into Japanese culture, the cultural normalisation of and permissive attitude towards it explained through the country’s religio
perpetrators. Ankoku butoh, literally the ‘dance of utter darkness’, was first performed in Japan by Tatsumi Hijikata and then developed by Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno (among others) into a global dance practice. Featuring dancers whose bodies appear as if they were cadavers refusing to die, butoh was born of death, or of many deaths: the death of a Japanese culture that was, in 1959, entering into a
of American gothic and the overlapping transition to a globalgothic in which America is but a part leads me to discuss two canonical, antebellum-era American gothic texts, and one contemporary instance with close ties to these, concluding with a final example of a globalgothic ‘America’ made in Japan. Each suggests the American nation state to be built atop unstable foundations, as representatives of