Introduction: The Melodrama of Mobility -- The Eight Women -- Key Words -- Class Work: Education Stories -- Social Mobility: "Facts" and "Fictions" -- Personality Speaking -- Gendering Displacement: Men, Masculinity, and the Nation -- All in the Family: Class Distances and Divides -- When It's All Said and Done ... -- Conclusion: Living Through Compressed Modernity
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
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes
Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002. http://purl.oclc.org/DLF/benchrepro0212 MiAaHDL
In English
Print version record
digitized 2011 HathiTrust Digital Library committed to preserve pda MiAaHDL
