Specific Narrative Structures Research Articles

‘Why Korea Failed?’: The American Discourse of Korea’s Historical Failure at the Turn of the 20th Century

Abstract The discourse of Korea’s failed history has been mostly a production of Japanese colonial scholarship, but the early texts that American authors produced were what guided the Western understanding of Korean history during the long 20th Century. Despite the importance of these texts that left significant imprints on later academic works and policy decisions, scholars have not as yet examined properly the American discourse of failure in Korean history. This article analyzes the representative American books on Korean history of authors William E. Griffis and Homer B. Hulbert to describe the emergence of the American discourse of Korea’s failed history in the late 19th and the early 20th centuries. It argues that early American authors of accounts of Korean history wrote them in a specific narrative structure that depicted Korea’s past as a story of gradual decline that ended with failure. These works identify three major themes – isolation, victimization, and dependency – as explanations for why Korea failed. Then, the article examines the doctoral dissertations of Harold J. Noble and George M. McCune to show how this early narrative framework during the 1930s and the 1940s continued thereafter to shape U.S. understanding of Korea even into the 1950s, informing both policymakers and scholars.

How to narrate urbicides? Lidija Ginzburg’s and Miron Białoszewski’s portrayals of urban destruction

Cities are relationally produced social spaces and in constant flux due to the ever-changing everyday spatial practices that produce and condition them. At the same time, they can become concepts abstracted into symbolic, monolithic ideas, pawns in political or historiographic narratives. Consequently, their death or survival in states of exception can become a substitute for the victorious or unsuccessful struggle for certain values or political orders. In this article, I explore how such symbolic connotations of death or survival of a city relate to the concrete experience of losing personal urban spaces and communities and how this interrelation can be represented in literature. In two case studies, Lidija Ginzburg’s Notes from the Blockade (1984) and Miron Białoszewski’s A Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising (1970), I show how literary texts have the potential to turn away from an abstracting view on cities and how they show the complexity of urban life in a state of exception. Consequently, I demonstrate how Ginzburg’s and Białoszewski’s texts narrate the death of a city not as the death of a specific concept, but as an irreversible loss of concrete urban spaces and practices, bringing to the fore the relational aspect of urban space and its decay. Implying such a relational understanding of urban space, these texts constitute apt representations of urbicides – a term which also presupposes the Lefebvrean notion of space being a relational product of building fabric, spatial practice and symbolic spatial attributions. The article thus shows how both Ginzburg’s and Białoszewski’s texts, through their specific perspectivization and narrative structure, subvert the institutional, abstracting memory discourses about the events they address by focusing on the concrete, subjective experience of spatial alienation during the Blockade of Leningrad and the Warsaw Uprising.

CONVEYING THE INDIVIDUAL STYLE OF A YOUNG ADULT LITERATURE AUTHOR IN TRANSLATION (BASED ON “THE PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER” BY S. CHBOSKY)

The article focuses on the problems of literary translation, mainly the problems of conveying the individual style of a young adult literature author. The relevance of this topic stems from the insufficient analysis both of the notion of the individual style itself and the interconnection of the individual style and the genre of a literary text. The paper discusses the core theoretical concepts of the individual style as well as the main characteristics of young adult literature, and examines the specific features of transfering the style elements of a young adult author. The paper is based on the novel “The perks of being a wallflower” (1999) written by an American author S. Chbosky, and its translation into Russian made by E. Petrova in 2013. The purpose of the research is to identify some dominant elements of the author‟s style and to evaluate the degree of their adequacy in the Russian translation. In the course of the study, the following problems of conveying the individual style of a young adult literature author were identified: a specific narrative structure, the usage of colloquial vocabulary; a number of specific syntactical stylistic devices. The paper examines a set of examples illustrating these features of the author‟s style and analyses their translation into Russian. The analysis reveals that the author‟s individual style is often not adequately transferred, thus, alternative variants of translation that convey the key elements of the author‟s writing style may be provided. As a result, a conclusion is made that the individual style of a young adult literature author has its own peculiarities, and its appropriate preservation requires not only a general understanding of the genre‟s specific features, but the skills of a linguostylistic analysis of the text and the ability to translate certain lexical means and stylistic devices that an author can use at all language levels.

The Ethics of Serial Narrative Structures

The power of episodic television shows such as Columbo (NBC, 1968-1978; ABC, 1988-2003) in which each episode tells a full story, has been highlighted by Jean-Pierre Esquenazi (2017: 107-28), who compares them to cubist works, whose universes become denser over time. Yet, surveys evidence that audiences generally prefer watching serial television shows whose narrative arcs develop over numerous episodes (Glevarec 2012; Combes 2015). Series such as E.R. (NBC, 1994-2009), Angel (The WB, 1999-2004), LOST (ABC, 2004-2010), Person of Interest (CBS, 2011-2016) and Awake (NBC, 2012), which are the focus of this essay, negotiate a “balance between episodic and serial demands” (Mittell 2015: 20), as they include episodes that both stand on their own and advance various long-term narrative arcs. These semi-serial shows display a writing which, season after season, feeds on the very tension between their episodic and serial aspects, between short-term and long-term features. This tension raises ethical stakes, particularly an ethics of care, which this essay will attempt to bring to the fore, drawing from the work of Sandra Laugier (2014: 261). Laugier’s work invites us to understand how television shows, through their durations and the various kinds of attachment they elicit, may educate viewers morally and make them attentive to what seems to be unremarkable within ordinary life. Her recent work on TV series (2019) focuses on their representational contents – situations, dialogues, gestures, dilemmas, identity politics and (political or moral) choices made by (groups of) characters – but it does not take into account the way specific narrative structures may encourage spectators to adopt a particular ethical view. The purpose of this essay is precisely to focus on the ethics of care invoked through serial narrative structures. By analyzing several examples, we will show that semi-serial shows thematize their own narrative negotiations within the story world and, even if they construct strong serial arcs, maintain the importance of the episodic form as a metaphor of human beings in their very individualities and specificities.

Tradicionalne predstave o životinjama u romanu "Opsada crkve Sv. Spasa" Gorana Petrovića - funkcija i značenje

This paper examines function and meaning of traditional folk beliefs related to animals in the novel "The Siege of the Church of St. Salvation". Research is attempting to show that the folk beliefs about animals are included in creating novel structure and meaning and characterization of characters in the novel. Presence of traditional folk beliefs can be dominant or partial, it can be transformed or absent, which creates a confronted image of traditional and modern man. Research is showing in which way traditional beliefs are shaped and transformed to create novel of specific postmodern narrative structure.

Cognitive Function of Conceptual Metaphors in “The Raw Shark Texts” by Steven Hall

From the perspective of modern cognitive science the conceptual metaphor reflects the mental aspect of cognition and creation of a new conception of the world. Therefore, numerous researchers in the area of conceptual metaphor explored it as the understanding of one conceptual domain in terms of another, paying little attention to the role of fiction diegesis. Thus, the objective of the article is to gain a better understanding of conceptual metaphor perception in the diegesis of Steven Hall's fiction. In “The Raw Shark Texts” the conceptual worldview helps the protagonist to recreate the chronicle of his self-identification after the posttraumatic loss of memory. Human knowledge, experience and communication as well as his individual mind, ideas and thoughts are perceived by the protagonist’s split personality as an aquatic space inhabited by conceptual fish. His fear of the conceptual shark, feeding on his memory, generates distinctive psychedelic hydro-text in the form of specific narrative structures. The state of fear also extends to increased human dependence on technology, digital databases (on-line memory storage and loss). The discreteness of narrative diegesis emphasizes the protagonist’s frustrations and is used by the author as a literary imitation of dissociative amnesia. Besides peculiar metaphorical expressions, in the author’s visual metaphors, owing to the simultaneous implementation of the first and second planes of the metaphor content, a third plane (a new reality) arises. Comprehension of conceptual metaphors as intimately interconnected in the narrative diegesis reveals the way of creating layered, intertwined conceptual reality exemplified by the First / the Second Eric Sanderson’s narrative structures. Consequently, metaphorical expressions and visual metaphors in Steven Hall's novel are merely a manifestation of the conceptual metaphors underlying them. Reproducing the features of perception mechanisms in their interaction with psychological, the author was able to catch the common between tangible things and abstract concepts, matter and idea, to compare the incomparable. This approach allows us to consider the conceptual metaphor as a structural component of meta-fiction and to emphasize the cognition specificity of metaphor in creation of new realities in it.

Storytelling or theory building? Hopkins’ sociology of safety

In the past two decades, Andrew Hopkins has been a very successful analyst of technological disasters and an acclaimed storyteller. In this article, I argue that he is also a theorist, and that he has developed over 40 years a normative sociological model of safety for studying major events. To do so, I first situate his contribution through a historical perspective going back to the 1970s and 1980s, a time during which Hopkins established core elements of a research program on catastrophic events subsequently deployed in late the 1990s onwards. Initially inspired in the 1970s and 1980s by the crime of the powerful, white-collar crime literature and a Marxist socio-legal perspective of society, he developed what I define as a white-collar crime accident model (WCC-AM). He then moves in the 1990s and 2000s on to a more organisational and practical sociology of safety elaborated in his retrospective accounts of disasters. To ground this assertion, I explain how his storytelling success results from the invention of a specific narrative structure which is based on a repeated sequence of description (1), assumption (2), explanation (3), comparison (4), recommendation (5) and counterfactual reasoning (6), applied to many articulated topics. From there, I extract a normative sociological model of safety built over two decades, and then discuss some of the findings of this study.

The Director Who Knew Himself: Remaking the Romance in The Man Who Knew Too Much

The Director Who Knew Himself:Remaking the Romance in The Man Who Knew Too Much Matthew Bolton (bio) Alfred Hitchcock's reputation as an auteur with a consistent interest in specific themes, techniques, aesthetics, and narrative structures is well known to anyone with even a passing knowledge of film history. His long shadow stretches across the twentieth century, with early British films like The 39 Steps (1935) and The Lady Vanishes (1938), classics from his American era like Rebecca (1940) and Strangers on a Train (1951), and universally recognized masterpieces like Vertigo (1958), Psycho (1960), and The Birds (1963) all bearing the distinctive mark of Hitchcock's artistry, persona, and brand. As Thomas Leitch has pointed out, however, an auteurist understanding of Hitchcock as a sui generis genius is undermined by the fact that the majority of his films—including each of those mentioned above—are adaptations of preexisting source material, not original cinematic works. For Leitch, Hitchcock's reputation is built as much on his "unquestioned success in casting himself as the auteur of his films" as it is on his unquestionable talent as a filmmaker.1 Hitchcock's capacity to "eclips[e] authors whose claim to authority was simply less powerful" than his own should be central, Leitch argues, to our understanding of Hitchcock—and other auteurs like Stanley Kubrick and Walt Disney—as a filmmaker whose success was founded on the adaptation of other narrative works.2 Thus Hitchcock's auteur status—and the implication of originality that goes [End Page 165] along with it—seems in tension with a filmography filled with adaptations. One wonders, then, what would happen if Hitchcock had attempted to adapt the work of someone with the same cultural cachet and universal recognition as himself. As it happens, we don't have to wonder. Hitchcock gave us the perfect test case in 1956 when he remade his film The Man Who Knew Too Much from source material he was intimately familiar with: his own 1934 film of the same name.3 By engaging in that most rare case of adaptation, a filmmaker remaking his or her own film, Hitchcock gives viewers a chance to explore not only his adaptation strategies but also his understanding of what a Hitchcock film was and how it had developed in the intervening two decades, years that brought him international fame and fortune, a string of massive commercial and aesthetic successes, and a move from Britain to Hollywood. Further, the remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much also falls at an especially important moment in Hitchcock's career, just before he takes a turn from the lightly comic adventure films of the 1940s and early 1950s—Spellbound (1945), Notorious (1946), Strangers on a Train, and Rear Window (1954)—to the cynical irony and apocalyptic visions he is perhaps best known for, Vertigo, Psycho, The Birds, and Marnie (1964). Theoretical Approaches to Hitchcock and Remakes Of course, considering Hitchcock as an adapter and a remaker opens up a variety of theoretical questions, particularly in terms of what precisely we mean by "remake." The taxonomies developed by remake theorists, while productive and useful in most scenarios, are of little help here, in part because the case of a filmmaker remaking his or her own work—autocitation, using Robert Stam's expansion of Gerard Genette's broad category of intertextuality—is too rare to be anything more than an unusual exception to these theoretical frameworks.4 (Indeed, The Man Who Knew Too Much is one of the only examples often cited, along with George Sluizer's The Vanishing [1988/1993].) However, this [End Page 166] also makes The Man Who Knew Too Much an interesting limit case for the field of remake and adaptation studies as a whole. If, as Catherine Grant has it, we can expect that "film auteurs … make aspects of [earlier] texts their own, over-writing them with their own traceable signatures, perhaps reconfiguring them by incorporating references to other (rewritten) intertexts," then what do we find in these rare cases when the earlier texts are their own?5 Commentators examining The Man Who Knew Too Much as a remake generally fall into one of two...

Analyzing Narrative Structure Of " The Tale Of Afshin And Boudolaf " From Bayhaqi's " History " Based On Gérard Genette’s Theory

Analyzing the constituent elements of a narrative and representation of its governing rules help us in better understanding of mechanisms and relationships within the narrative elements. Since narratology is one of the main branches of structuralism, analyzing narrative structure of past texts and their evolution can be lead to valuable results and open new and different perspectives to audiences.Bayhaqi’s is one of the basic texts in Persian prose. This research analyzes narrative structure of “The Tale of Afshin and Boudlof” from Bayhaqi's History based on the ideas of French structuralist, Gerard Genette. The narrative levels of this work has been studied in interaction with the components of duration, mood, and voice) to uncover its specific narrative structure and Bayhaqi’s writing power in taking advantage of the possibilities of language and literary. Unlike believers in the idea that past proses of Persian literature just stories and narrations and they lack ordered structure and strong plot, this research shows the ordered structure and strong plot of the studied case according to ideas of Gerard Genette.

Дискурс влади і критика споживацтва в романі “Хмарний атлас” Д. Мітчелла

In the paper, the specific narrative structure of the novel “Cloud Atlas” has been analyzed. The array of philosophical questions that determine the post-postmodern literature has been outlined. In the novel, the motif connected with the rebirth of the human being has being explicated; the belief related to the irrational bond between the events in the past, present and future, about memory as a special sphere where the crossing of different temporal modes is possible has been visualized. Changeable in this transformation system are such factors as sex, gender, social positions, religious affiliations, etc. The immanent essence of the “humanity” has been defined. This, Sonmi~451 in the fifth story struggles against the totalitarism which cultivates the industry of consumerism transforming entertaining ads and other forms of leisure into the ideology. The forms of criticism toward the consumerism and the bonds between memory, knowledge, and power have been explained. In the paper, the author focuses on the features related to the transition from postmodernism to post-postmodernism in contemporary English literature. The key features of postmodernism in accordance with the theoretical approaches I. Hassan, M. Foucault, F. Kermode, D. Fokkema, etc. have been outlined. The categories of inconsistency and immanence that determine the characteristics of the postmodern sensibility have been emphasized. The conflicts between reason and intuition, myth and technology, religion and science have been analyzed in the discourse of post-postmodernism.

Поетика наративу в романах Антуана Володіна

Antoine Volodine is reputed for inventing new forms in the French literature at the turn of XX–XXI centuries. Our study is dedicated to Volodine’s narrative structure, i.e. the stratification of narrative instances, the depersonalization of narrator and characters, the metanarrativization of story. Antoine Volodine creates a fictional world of uncertain characters floating between life and death and telling their stories in polyphonic voices. First, our study revealed the lack of demarcation between “I” and “we” and the blend of narrative levels created by ambivalent voices merging into a single “post-exotic horn”. Second, we discovered that metatextual comments and narrative figures of “mise en abyme” and metalepsis help to “alienate” the text and dramatize the relations between the author and readers. As a result, a specific “textual fiction” is being created to embody philosophical problems in Volodine’s meta-utopic novels. Finally, the research determined a set of poetical dominants typical for Volodine’s novels: the interference of homo- and heterodiegetic narrator instances, the uncertain nature of narrators and characters, the polyphonic character of voices as well as metatextual and transgressive structures. It was concluded that the revealed poetical dominants are not only a part of the literary game, but a specific way to represent the speech act. Antoine Volodine’s multilevel narrators share common mental pictures that show the experience of defeat, marginalization and imprisonment. The specific narrative structure helps the writer to create the effect of ambiguity and vagueness, adds a bit of doubt in the act of perception of his novels, updates the metaphysical perspective of the postmodern anti-utopia.

What's your neural function, visual narrative conjunction? Grammar, meaning, and fluency in sequential image processing

Visual narratives sometimes depict successive images with different characters in the same physical space; corpus analysis has revealed that this occurs more often in Japanese manga than American comics. We used event-related brain potentials to determine whether comprehension of “visual narrative conjunctions” invokes not only incremental mental updating as traditionally assumed, but also, as we propose, “grammatical” combinatoric processing. We thus crossed (non)/conjunction sequences with character (in)/congruity. Conjunctions elicited a larger anterior negativity (300–500 ms) than nonconjunctions, regardless of congruity, implicating “grammatical” processes. Conjunction and incongruity both elicited larger P600s (500–700 ms), indexing updating. Both conjunction effects were modulated by participants’ frequency of reading manga while growing up. Greater anterior negativity in frequent manga readers suggests more reliance on combinatoric processing; larger P600 effects in infrequent manga readers suggest more resources devoted to mental updating. As in language comprehension, it seems that processing conjunctions in visual narratives is not just mental updating but also partly grammatical, conditioned by comic readers’ experience with specific visual narrative structures.

Image of the Duchess de Polignac in Factual and Novelized Biography and Portraiture

The article explores the interrelation of biographical genre and portraiture, along with the problems of portrait interpretation and representation of historical figures. Visual images influence the shaping of biographer’s perception of the subject. Portraits are documents biographer knowingly or unconsciously makes use of when writing a biography. Portraits and biographies can be considered works of the same genre in different art forms. Notwithstanding the great amount of factual sources on Queen Marie Antoinette’s notorious favorite - Duchess Gabrielle de Polignac - and artistic interpretations of her person, or perhaps due to that, the Duchess remains an ambiguous and elusive historical figure. While the extant portraits by Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun project a specific image, various views on the Duchess’ person and character have been adopted in recent biographical writing. In each biography under analysis the author highlights a specific narrative structure that determines the method of the character’s representation. The difference in genre influences the representation of the character as well. The biographical novel presents a certain human type, a contrasting image. Whereas in the factual biographies the Duchess de Polignac’s person remains open to the reader’s interpretation.

Multimodal Language of the Intertitles in the Trailers of American Romance-Comedy Feature Films

Film trailers are regarded as a truly unique form of film advertising constructed on the basis of specific narrative and promotional structures. By means of adequate mini-narratives presented in intertitles, they not only convey some twists of the plot in various comedies, but also create a specific discourse which is marked by the interplay of different elements: language, topography and colour. From the perspective of multimodality, these elements are semiotic modes with a specific communicative potential. The analysis of the interplay between the contents of the intertitles and their typographic elements has shown that typographic variations, especially the ones related to the size and form of typefaces and to their regularity, are often employed to produce a targeted message. Colour can be considered an effective referent to the key words, semantic units or contrastive emotions in the intertitles. Due to existing temporal and spatial limitations and the multiple goals of film trailers, the interplay of semiotic modes noted in these visual products is even more intensive, salient and outspoken. In fact, this phenomenon is seen at its best in the intertitles giving the title of comedies. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.sal.0.27.13746

Realising consilience: How better communication between archaeologists, historians and natural scientists can transform the study of past climate change in the Mediterranean

This paper reviews the methodological and practical issues relevant to the ways in which natural scientists, historians and archaeologists may collaborate in the study of past climatic changes in the Mediterranean basin. We begin by discussing the methodologies of these three disciplines in the context of the consilience debate, that is, attempts to unify different research methodologies that address similar problems. We demonstrate that there are a number of similarities in the fundamental methodology between history, archaeology, and the natural sciences that deal with the past (“palaeoenvironmental sciences”), due to their common interest in studying societal and environmental phenomena that no longer exist. The three research traditions, for instance, employ specific narrative structures as a means of communicating research results. We thus present and compare the narratives characteristic of each discipline; in order to engage in fruitful interdisciplinary exchange, we must first understand how each deals with the societal impacts of climatic change. In the second part of the paper, we focus our discussion on the four major practical issues that hinder communication between the three disciplines. These include terminological misunderstandings, problems relevant to project design, divergences in publication cultures, and differing views on the impact of research. Among other recommendations, we suggest that scholars from the three disciplines should aim to create a joint publication culture, which should also appeal to a wider public, both inside and outside of academia.

A smart methodology to improve the story-building process

Museum narratives are created from a conceptualization of events that can be structurally organized and referred to as the story. Therefore, the main process of developing a museum narrative is one of story-building. This paper presents a methodology to enrich the creation of stories for digital storytelling. The methodology is at the basis of a smart authoring system that supports authors of digital storytelling in the identification of contents from external repositories and their automatic mapping on different narrative structures, according to syntactic and semantic rules and well- defined narrative structures. Furthermore, the methodology leverages on semantic models and technologies such as ontologies, clustering and text analysis, and supports the development of a smart environment for creation of stories starting from a set of pictures. We have validated our methodology for a specific narrative structure, i.e. the Dramatic Arc, for the creation of an educational storytelling related to the museum exhibition about Second World War.

Między Koreą i Europą. O dramaturgii filmów Kim Ki-duka

Between Korea and Europe. The Dramaturgy of Films by Kim Ki-duk The article attempts to point out how Korean director Kim Ki-duk constructs the dramaturgy of his films. His works belong to the European art cinema tradition, and are marked by specific narrative structures and strategies (e.g. chronological order of events, parallel and mirror plot schemes, silent characters and limitation of film dialogue). Dramaturgically significant are also repeating scenes of violence and cruelty, characteristic for Kim. Finally, briefly presented are critical approaches to his films, which together with the director’s biography allow us to call him “an accented filmmaker” (using terms and concepts proposed by Hamid Naficy).

Narrative research in climate change adaptation—Exploring a complementary paradigm for research and governance

Climate adaptation research increasingly focuses on the socio-cultural dimensions of change. In this context, narrative research is often seen as a qualitative social science method used to frame adaptation communication. However, this perspective neglects an important insight provided by narrative theory as applied in the cognitive sciences and other practical fields: human cognition is organized around specific narrative structures. In adaptation, this means that how we ‘story’ the environment determines how we understand and practice adaptation, how risks are defined, who is authorized as actors in the change debate, and the range of policy options considered. Furthermore, relating an experience through story-telling is already doing ‘knowledge work’, or learning. In taking narrative beyond its use as an extractive social research methodology, we argue that narrative research offers an innovative, holistic approach to a better understanding of socio-ecological systems and the improved, participatory design of local adaptation policies. Beyond producing data on local knowledge(s) and socio-cultural and affective-emotive factors influencing adaptive capacity, it can significantly inform public engagement, deliberation and learning strategies–features of systemic adaptive governance. We critically discuss narrative as both a self-reflective methodology and as a paradigmatic shift in future adaptation research and practice. We explore the narrative approach as a basis for participatory learning in the governance of socio-ecological systems. Finally, we assemble arguments for investing in alternative governance approaches consistent with a shift to a ‘narrative paradigm’.

Language specific narrative text structure elements in multilingual children

The investigation of narrative skills in children is significant in many respects; amongst other things, narratives can yield information about a child’s use of decontextualised, literate language features (Curenton and Justice 2004) while simultaneously providing access to the child’s level of competence concerning narrative-specific aspects. Narrative abilities have been linked to literacy development and academic achievement (Dickinson and Tabors 2001) and are often used to predict language progress (Botting, Faragher, Simkin, Knox and Conti-Ramsden 2001). Moreover, narrative skills constitute an area of verbal language development in which delays are difficult to compensate (Girolametto, Wiigs, Smyth, Weitzman and Pearce 2001, Manhardt and Rescorla 2002). However, in multilingual settings the assessment of narrative skills cannot be restricted to language proficiency measurements in each of a child’s languages. Rather, this assessment needs to include “linguistic descriptions of ethno-linguistic discourse patterns (contrastive rhetoric)” (Barnitz 1986:95) in order to assess the roles which cultural knowledge and language-specific narrative text structure elements play in the development of narrative skills in multilingual children. This article discusses the necessity to identify such language-specific elements of story structures. Empirical findings are presented which illustrate that 10- to 12-year-old children from Malawi exhibit narrative practices while they retell visually and aurally presented stories. It appears that these narrative practices are influenced by African folktales. The children’s retellings in both Chichewa and English cannot simply be measured by canonical narrative text structures commonly used in academic settings. The global significance of such a discussion is reflected by a growing concern that academic success may be compromised by a misalignment between the narrative practices in a child’s primary language(s) and the narrative practices in a respective language of teaching and learning (e.g. Makoe and McKinney 2009, Souto-Manning 2013).

한국 웹툰의 아이러니 연구

한국 웹툰은 대중적으로 생산 및 소비되는 동시대 대표 서사체이다. 이 중에서도 짧은 에피소드 형식으로 구성된 '일상툰'은 웹툰의 대표적인 형식으로 웹툰의 고유한 특징을 잘 드러낸다. 본 연구에서는 일상툰 특유의 서사 구성 방식에 주목하고, 이를 통해 웹툰의 서사적 미학을 분석하고자 한다. 특히 본 연구에서는 웹툰이 한국 대도시를 배경으로 채택하며, 대도시에서 살아가는 소시민의 일상을 중요한 소재로 채택하는 점에 주목했다. 웹툰은 간결한 글과 그림의 조합을 통해 현대인의 삶과, 현실에 대한 인식을 드러낸다. 이때 한 컷 안에서 이미지의 표현과 서사의 내용이 상반된 관계 속에서 나타나고, 이 조합의 과정에서 웹툰 특유의 아이러니가 발생한다. 웹이라는 일상적인 형식 속에 일탈적인 내용이 조합되어 나타나는 아이러니를 통해 소시민들의 삶은 소위 '웃기면서도 슬프게' 표현된다. 이를 인물, 사건, 배경 층위에서 분석하면 먼저 웹툰의 주인공은 정보의 부족이나 무지 등으로 '박해받는 희생자'로 설정되어 있다. 뿐만 아니라 웹툰은 '웹'이라는 인터페이스의 특성상 스크롤 바와 여백을 서사적 장치로 활용하는 수직적 구성 방식을 취하는 동시에, 구성의 요소를 극적인 반전의 서사로 승화시킨다. 웹툰은 분명 동시대 도시 공간의 일상성을 재현하되, 풍자와 패러디를 통해서 대중들로부터 공감을 불러 일으킨다. 이처럼 본 연구에서는 웹툰이 '아이러니'를 통해 대중적 서사체로 발전할 수 있었음을 밝히고자 했다. Webtoons are popularly consumed in Korea. Especially the 'Dailytoons', which are composed of short episodes, are the most popular form of webtoons. This study focuses on the specific narrative structure of the dailytoons, and also tries to figure out what makes webtoons so popular. This study tried to analyze the special features of figures, events, and backgrounds of webtoons. Particularly in webtoons, Korean metropolitan is employed as a background and the daily life of the lower middle class in this big city is importantly used in the story. Each cut of a webtoon consists of simple words and images, and it shows the life of modern people and the way they recognize the reality. The important thing is that the image and the narrative of one cut often appears contradictively. 'Irony' occurs in the process of combination of the words and images. And the life of the lower middle class is depicted 'fun-and-sadly' through irony. For example, the main characters of webtoons are portrayed as persecuted victims because of their lack of information or ignorance. At this point, they are described ridiculously by a play on words. In addition, webtoons often presents twist plots using the scroll bars and margins of 'web' interface. Also it uses parody to show reality in satire. With irony, webtoons represent the daily life of the public, which is cynical as well as humorous. This study tried to suggest that webtoons should attribute its success to 'irony' in its narrative.