| This dissertation investigates the multifarious relationship of the Korean and the foreign as manifested in South Korean popular culture in the age of the global media. It examines how the foreign is defined, interpreted, and related to in the cultural products or practices of South Koreans by analyzing two Korean films, Take Care of My Cat and The Chaser, and one recent cultural phenomenon concerning the sudden popularity of American television series. By doing so, it demonstrates that South Korean culture is not only demarcated by the external foreign but also contains the foreign within itself, and that this culture manifests itself by the diverse, changing ways in which it negotiates with the foreign within and outside its shifting cultural boundaries. At the same time, it seeks to highlight the heterogeneous and contradictory ways of constructing or negotiating the foreign and to present them as a manifestation of diverse, conflicting, and unstable as the ideas about Korean identity and culture.;The purpose of this dissertation is twofold: first, to assert the indispensable role of the foreign and inherent hybridity of South Korean popular culture, which is too often overshadowed by the anti-colonial nationalist discourse; and second, to acknowledge the multiple ways in which a local subject relates to the national and foreign cultures outside the mainstream discourse. |
