The Melodrama of Mobility : Women, Talk, and Class in Contemporary South Korea / Nancy Abelmann.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Abelmann, Nancy, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Middle-aged women--Social conditions--Korea (South).

Middle-aged women.

Middle-aged women--Economic conditions--Korea (South).

Middle-aged women--Employment--Korea (South).

Social mobility--Korea (South).

Social mobility.

Social classes--Korea (South).

Social classes.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (345 p.)

Place of Publication:

Honolulu : University of Hawaii Press, [2003]

Language Note:

English

Summary:

How do people make sense of their world in the face of the breakneck speed of contemporary social change? Through the lives and narratives of eight women, The Melodrama of Mobility chronicles South Korea's experience of just such dizzyingly rapid development. Abelmann captures the mood, feeling, and language of a generation and an era while providing a rare window on the personal and social struggles of South Korean modernity. Drawing also from television soap operas and films, she argues that a melodramatic sensibility speaks to South Korea's transformation because it preserves the tension and ambivalence of daily life in unsettled times. The melodramatic mode helps people to wonder: Can individuals be blamed for their social fates? How should we live? Who can say who is good or bad? By combining the ethnographic tools of anthropology, an engagement with prevailing sociological questions, and a literary approach to personal narratives, The Melodrama of Mobility offers a rich portrait of the experience of compressed modernity in the non-West.

Contents:

Frontmatter

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PREFACE

1. INTRODUCTION: The Melodrama of Mobility

2. THE EIGHT WOMEN

3. KEY WORDS

4. CLASS WORK: Education Stories

5. SOCIAL MOBILITY: "Facts" and "Fictions"

6. PERSONALITY SPEAKING

7. GENDERING DISPLACEMENT. Men, Masculinity, and the Nation

8. ALL IN THE FAMILY: Class Distances and Divides

9. WHEN IT'S ALL SAID AND DONE

10. CONCLUSION: Living Through Compressed Modernity

CODA

REFERENCES

INDEX

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 28. Aug 2019)

ISBN:

9780824864859

0824864859

OCLC:

878132971