Toward a cultural history in the Korean present: Locating the cultural politics of the everyday.

摘要

The aim of this thesis is to explore the complex and messy terrain of Korean cultural studies by working through and articulating a number of explanatory frameworks and problematics---in particular, the cultural politics of theory, the national-popular culture, the urban place/space, and the increasing effects of globalization as a powerful discourse and lived process in South Korea. In the dissertation, I chart and assess how different groups of Korean intellectuals have attempted to come to grips with the radical recomposition of culture, politics, and society in post-authoritarian Korea by selectively mobilizing various theoretical frameworks largely borrowed from Anglo-American cultural studies. In particular, in situating the explosion of a variety of cultural criticism and cultural studies, I analyze the ways local practitioners in cultural studies have labored and struggled to define "cultural politics [munhwa jungchihak]" and taken it as an emergent---at the same time agonizingly elusive---intellectual concern and new base for critical and imaginative intervention into "everyday life."