Ch’unhyang—further typological comparisons from late-Chosŏn Korean song culture and modern Korean film culture

Abstract

Continuing my commentary on the film Ch’unhyang as a point of typological comparison, I will compare here, more broadly, the visual art of film-making with the verbal art of poetry and song as we see that art at work in the epic and lyric traditions of ancient Greece. In making such a comparison, I will highlight two general features of verbal art, metaphor and metonym (an alternative way of referring to the second of these features is metonymy). Examples of these two features can easily be found in both the Korean and the ancient Greek verbal arts, but my emphasis for now is different: examples can also be found in the modern visual art of film-making as we see it at work in the film Ch’unhyang. And what I find most remarkable about the uses of metaphor and metonym in this film, as also in all visual arts, is that these uses are transcendent, that is, they are relatively free of limitations. Similarly in the case of ancient Greek verbal art, as we will see, the uses of metaphor and metonym transcend categories of genre such as epic and lyric—even if we accept the idea that Homeric poetry is a general form of epic, and that the singing of lament is a specialized form of lyric.