Boosung Kim - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Boosung Kim
In/Outside: English Studies in Korea
Institute of British and American Studies, 2021
Feminist Studies in English Literature, 2017
Feminist Studies in English Literature, 2018
Feminist Studies in English Literature, 2018
The Journal of English Language and Literature, 2019
The advent of cinema at the dawn of the twentieth century profoundly ruptured the nineteenth-cent... more The advent of cinema at the dawn of the twentieth century profoundly ruptured the nineteenth-century notion of spectatorship as a constituent of bourgeois male subjectivity by allowing marginalized social groups such as working-class women, child vagrants, and rural people to have access to a new public sphere. This paper focuses on the British modernist writer Dorothy Richardson’s film writing, which appeared in the avant-garde literary magazine Close Up (1927-1933), to show how the silent cinema spectatorship in the 1920s challenged gendered, class-bound notions of spectatorship. In particular, this paper explores the representation of spec-tatorial practices in her film writing and the ramifications of a particular mode of perception she valorizes: contemplation. Throughout the column she wrote for Close Up, Richardson, writing from the perspective of one of the spectators seated in a movie theatre, committed herself to theorizing spectator subjectivity in the early sound era. By taking up a position similar to that of the nineteenth-century male urban investigator, Richardson revises the dominant imaginative mappings of London through her discussion of the spaces of the movie theaters and the demographic makeup of the cinema audience. Challenging dominant views on cinematic perception, Richardson associates absorptive, contemplative modes of perception with plebeian spectatorship to highlight the cinema’s therapeutic, emancipatory function for the underprivileged. Richardson also contends that silent films, when accompanied by simple piano music and performed in a small, garage-like movie theater, should be the norm to secure and nurture contemplation.
The Henry James Review, 2019
On December 22, 1895, about eleven months after the London premiere performance of Guy Domville, ... more On December 22, 1895, about eleven months after the London premiere performance of Guy Domville, Henry James recorded in his notebooks that he had put his pen to what he called "the little subject of the child" (WMK 276). "Make my point of view," James wrote, "my line, the consciousness, the dim, sweet, sacred, wondering, clinging perception of the child, and one gets something like this" (277). Based on a true story he heard in 1892 at a dinner party, the project he initially conceived as "a fresh source of dramatic situations" (275) turned out to be his 1897 novel What Maisie Knew. In the same entry in which he sketched out his conception of the novel, James told himself that "EVERYTHING TAKES PLACE BEFORE MAISIE. That is a part of the essence of the thing-that, with the tenderness she inspires, the rest of the essence, the second of the golden threads of my form" (279). On December 28, 1895, Auguste and Louis Lumière introduced their newly invented Cinématographe, the first motion-picture apparatus that combined a portable camera for recording movement, a printer, and a projector by projecting a series of short films on a wide screen to a group of paying spectators at Le Salon Indien du Grand Café in Paris. Lasting less than a minute, each film was shot by Louis, who set up the tripod in front of objects that move. The results were single-shot recordings of scenes of everyday life, including a moving image of a train arriving at a station and factory workers streaming out of the factory gate. My inquiries begin with the contemporaneity of the invention of a literary method by a novelist preoccupied with technical experimentation and the invention of a visual apparatus that revolutionized ways of seeing. It is not a mere coincidence that only six days after James expressed his writerly ambition for a new literary method to "show" to his readers what takes place before a child through the child's eyes the
In/Outside: English Studies in Korea
Institute of British and American Studies, 2021
Feminist Studies in English Literature, 2017
Feminist Studies in English Literature, 2018
Feminist Studies in English Literature, 2018
The Journal of English Language and Literature, 2019
The advent of cinema at the dawn of the twentieth century profoundly ruptured the nineteenth-cent... more The advent of cinema at the dawn of the twentieth century profoundly ruptured the nineteenth-century notion of spectatorship as a constituent of bourgeois male subjectivity by allowing marginalized social groups such as working-class women, child vagrants, and rural people to have access to a new public sphere. This paper focuses on the British modernist writer Dorothy Richardson’s film writing, which appeared in the avant-garde literary magazine Close Up (1927-1933), to show how the silent cinema spectatorship in the 1920s challenged gendered, class-bound notions of spectatorship. In particular, this paper explores the representation of spec-tatorial practices in her film writing and the ramifications of a particular mode of perception she valorizes: contemplation. Throughout the column she wrote for Close Up, Richardson, writing from the perspective of one of the spectators seated in a movie theatre, committed herself to theorizing spectator subjectivity in the early sound era. By taking up a position similar to that of the nineteenth-century male urban investigator, Richardson revises the dominant imaginative mappings of London through her discussion of the spaces of the movie theaters and the demographic makeup of the cinema audience. Challenging dominant views on cinematic perception, Richardson associates absorptive, contemplative modes of perception with plebeian spectatorship to highlight the cinema’s therapeutic, emancipatory function for the underprivileged. Richardson also contends that silent films, when accompanied by simple piano music and performed in a small, garage-like movie theater, should be the norm to secure and nurture contemplation.
The Henry James Review, 2019
On December 22, 1895, about eleven months after the London premiere performance of Guy Domville, ... more On December 22, 1895, about eleven months after the London premiere performance of Guy Domville, Henry James recorded in his notebooks that he had put his pen to what he called "the little subject of the child" (WMK 276). "Make my point of view," James wrote, "my line, the consciousness, the dim, sweet, sacred, wondering, clinging perception of the child, and one gets something like this" (277). Based on a true story he heard in 1892 at a dinner party, the project he initially conceived as "a fresh source of dramatic situations" (275) turned out to be his 1897 novel What Maisie Knew. In the same entry in which he sketched out his conception of the novel, James told himself that "EVERYTHING TAKES PLACE BEFORE MAISIE. That is a part of the essence of the thing-that, with the tenderness she inspires, the rest of the essence, the second of the golden threads of my form" (279). On December 28, 1895, Auguste and Louis Lumière introduced their newly invented Cinématographe, the first motion-picture apparatus that combined a portable camera for recording movement, a printer, and a projector by projecting a series of short films on a wide screen to a group of paying spectators at Le Salon Indien du Grand Café in Paris. Lasting less than a minute, each film was shot by Louis, who set up the tripod in front of objects that move. The results were single-shot recordings of scenes of everyday life, including a moving image of a train arriving at a station and factory workers streaming out of the factory gate. My inquiries begin with the contemporaneity of the invention of a literary method by a novelist preoccupied with technical experimentation and the invention of a visual apparatus that revolutionized ways of seeing. It is not a mere coincidence that only six days after James expressed his writerly ambition for a new literary method to "show" to his readers what takes place before a child through the child's eyes the