3rd Conference

Conference Description 

In recent years, Korean crime narratives — crime fiction and crime-themed TV dramas, films, and webtoons — have attracted significant attention from readers, audiences, and scholars both within Korea and internationally. In response to this growing popularity and the increasing scholarly interest in the historical, social, and aesthetic dimensions of Korean crime narratives, the PSU-SKKU Consortium on Korean Popular Narratives and Media is hosting its third international conference, aiming to explore cultural representations of state, institutional, political, and everyday violence against socially vulnerable and marginalized groups in both premodern and modern Korean crime fiction.

Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s concept of law-annihilating “divine violence,” which confronts the injustice embedded in legal systems, as well as feminist scholarship on gender and justice in modern crime narratives, this conference invites papers that examine the aesthetic and political potential of crime narratives in expressing the precarity of the marginalized. We are particularly interested in explorations of how such narratives engage with gender issues at the intersections of sexuality, age, class, and race. Under the broad umbrella of “crime fiction,” we welcome submissions that engage with diverse media and subgenres — including film, TV dramas, webtoons, premodern court novels, science fiction, gothic novels, detective stories, medical horror, spy fiction, etc. — to address key questions about justice, violence, and rage. We encourage scholars to develop papers based on their presentations for publication in a special journal issue.