Transitional Emotions: Boredom and Distraction in Hong Sang-su's Travel Films

Abstract

This article explores the cultural significance of boredom and distraction in postmodern Korea by focusing on Hong Sang-su's holiday films. It posits that Hong's films about characters attempting to escape from the banalities of urban life can be seen to reveal, stylistically and thematically, the emotions and anxieties unleashed by excessive leisure in neoliberal Korea. By re-casting the absence of events in Hong's films as an existing affect of lacking, it challenges the adequacy of pre-existing affective paradigms in the understanding of boredom in neoliberal Korea. In recognition of the transient stage in which boredom as emotion finds itself, it proposes categorizing emotions at such historical junctures as "transitional emotions," drawing on theories that socialize rather than psychologize emotion by locating them as circulating inter-subjectively.

Factors Associated with Aging in Place among Community-Dwelling Older Adults in Korea: Findings from a National Survey

“…The basic pension, which was introduced to support the stability of low-income seniors and promote their welfare, had a positive effect on AIP intention. In previous studies [41][42][43], receipt of a basic pension was found to increase AIP intention. Under the basic pension scheme, the key is to reduce poverty in older adults.…”

Beyond Queering Elsa: The Erotics of Touch in Disney's Frozen Series

“…What makes something sticky in the first place is difficult to determine precisely because stickiness involves such a chain of effects.( The Cultural 91) Ahmed argues that contact is characterized by a “stickiness,” which “involves a form of relationality, or a ‘withness,’ in which the elements that are ‘with’ get bound together” ( The Cultural 91). Her “model of emotional ‘stickiness,’” as Youngmin Choe argues, “has adhesion and cohesion properties and functions simultaneously to block or to bind objects in an affective economy, in which emotions circulate,” and as such, provides a lens through which to consider the ways in which Elsa's body “materializes through contact,” producing an “engendering affect” (Choe 13). Significantly, as suggested in Frozen II , water always take different forms—it melts and freezes, flows in and out in a range of directions, crisscrossing space and time, in “a chain of effects” (Ahmed, The Cultural 91), and as such acts as a repository for different types of stories that need to be re‐membered, re‐told, re‐connected, and thus re‐felt.…”