David Cronenberg’s 1993 film M. Butterfly is a subversive rewriting of Giacomo Puccini’s classic opera Madama Butterfly. Focusing on the film’s capacity to shift between characters’ subjective shots, the essay argues that as multiple internal focalizors coexist in M. Butterfly, their respective takes and shots combine to form a kind of “synergy” to constantly configure and reconfigure the power hierarchies of gender, sexuality, race, etc. in the storyworld. In this way, the film deconstructs the rigid male/female, West/East oppositions delivered by the original opera through, among other factors, the highly fixed focalization typical of stage performance. A more universal claim based on the case study thus emerges: the dynamic nature of cinematic focalization could be visual cues inviting the audience to enter various ideological perspectives and unwittingly engage with their mutual dialogues.

This paper attempts a comparative analysis between Korean Sijo Poetry and ‘Indian traditions of haiku’ – particularly in sijo poems composed by Korean poet Yi Un-Sang and translated by Jaihiun Kim; and Indian author Rabindranath Tagore’s haiku poems in his book Stray Birds (1916). In the poetic world of short ‘verse libre’ where imagist poems of Western modernism may have held central attention for decades, an Asian turn has foregrounded Japanese ‘haiku’ and Korean sijo poetry in a new way. Yi became an influential figure in the history of today’s sijo and contributed largely to the nation’s literature. However, in Indian subcontinent, Rabindranath Tagore explored ‘haiku-like’ epigrammatic verses in his Stray Birds (1916) – a work that was translated by Tagore himself from his poetry collections Kanika (1899) and Lekhan (1926). Within their form and structure, both sijo and haiku evoke one single image/ concern in each poem; but the difference lies in their literary traditions as well as cultural variations. Both haiku and sijo poetry explore deep observations on natural phenomenon or regular life activities and offer perspectives of literary wellbeing in this process. From recent studies of positive cross-cultural psychology (PCCP), wellbeing scholar Tim Lomas proposes a model of “universal relativism” that includes “a universalising stance that looks for commonalities between people of different cultures, and a relativistic perspective focused on particularity, pluralism and difference.” (Lomas 69). The present paper offers a cross-cultural reading of both Yi Un-Sang and Tagore’s works to examine if readers can find textual tools for mindfulness practice. It also invites further exposure towards holistic wellbeing through shared human nature despite diverse cultural values.

This panel comprises 04 (four) essays, each reading select Bangladeshi and (South) Korean literary and cultural texts with a view to exploring the network of genetic and typological inter-animation. It is an initial phase of a longer project that intends to explore the known and the chiefly unknown connections between (South) Korea and Bangladesh that many literary and cultural texts in Korean and Bangla languages testify to. The idea of this panel was triggered by two recent events: first, once Han Kang won her Nobel in 2024, the iconic status of Rabindranath Tagore, a Nobel Laureate, in Korea resurfaced, and, second, a recent revaluation of Birangona (women raped during the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War) brought to the fore the Korean translation (by Seung Hee Jeon) of shaheen Akhtar’s novel, Talaash.

Culling insights from Dionýz Ďurišin’s concepts of interliterariness, this panel defines ‘genetic contact’ as the elements of similarities/ connections due to factual contact and ‘typological affinity’ as the elements of similarities in spite of no evidenced factual contact.

The panel broaches four dimensions in order to render its study range interdisciplinary and accommodative:

1. Korean and Bangladeshi aesthetics: Aynun Zaria’s paper takes resource from Byung Chul-Han’s Saving Beauty (2017) with a view to underscoring the ways Bangladeshi consumers received and postprocess the concepts and notions of ‘plastic beauty’ generated chiefly through K-drama that has a huge fan-following in Bangladesh.

2. Korean and Bangladeshi poetics: Jarin Tasneem Shoilee’s paper explores how Korean sijo poetry has impacted the generation and updating of haiku- and sijo-styled poetry in Bangla. Situating the poems in the transcultural planetary nexus of ideas and praxis, the paper locates ways in which literatures offer mental wellbeing across cultures.

3. Korean and Bangladeshi narratives on trauma 1 – sexual violence: Mashrur Shahid Hossain’s paper offers a long awaited comparative reading of narratives about and by women who were sexually abused in times of conflict – Korean ‘Comfort Women’ during the rule of the Imperial Japanese Armed Forces and Bangladeshi ‘Birangona’ during the 1971 Liberation War. The essay concentrates on women’s management of rage, resistance, and resilience in response to sexual abuse.

4. Korean and Bangladeshi narratives on trauma management 2 – diaspora: Redwan Ahmed’s essay compares novels by two diaspora writers to explore commonalities that migration-induced trauma generates across time and space. The essay contends that both Zia Haider Rahman’s In the Light of What We Know and Min Jin Lee's Pachinko testify to the common means through which migrant people manage their identities and lives in the hostlands.

The panel wishes to initiate an affirmative critical-affective dialogue on the potential of increasing trans-cultural and inter-lingual exchange between South Korea and Bangladesh.

The paper utilizes three award-winning biofictions in English, French, and Chinese, namely Blonde by Joyce Carols Oates from the US, La Septième Fonction du Language by Laurent Binet from France, and the Yanxia Alley by Wei Wei from PRC, to discuss how these novels do in narration from a comparative approach. In regard to narration, it is found that three biofictions do the narration in a chronically timed sequence, in which the novels begin with the start of the hero’s life at a certain stage or heroines’ life. Regarding the narration techniques, flashbacks as well as the plain prose is utilized in telling the story about the hero or heroines. The plots and characters bildung are considered worthy of researching into these three biofictions in which major events or interesting episodes have illustrated and expanded different lives of hero and heroines in the works. It is concluded that biofiction as a genre of novels is differentiated from biography, autobiography or autobiographical novel in that biofiction is a fiction genre based on the essence of the hero or heroine with fiction as the major elements.

This paper analyzes the experimental expressions that intentionally reveal the objectifying capability of film in Masahiro Shinoda’s Double Suicide (1969) and Toshio Matsumoto’s Demons (1971) to argue that the formal practices of defamiliarization in both films elicit a sense of uncanniness and disorientation as well as present an aesthetic of non-humanness. These formal practices involve manipulations of elements such as time, visibility, and human bodies, thereby showcasing mechanical performativity and multiple layers of visual objectification. The aesthetics of objectification or alienation transform filmic images into a potential platform for dialogues between Marxist materialism and New materialism.

The two films will be discussed in the contexts of post-war avant-garde art, Japanese New Wave cinema, and sociocultural movements during the 1960s and 1970s in Japan. Both Double Suicide and Demons were funded by Art Theatre Guild and adapted from theatrical plays; they exhibit an intended incomplete fusion of theatrical and filmic conventions, presenting themselves as attempts at anti-naturalism cinema and the exploration of artistic expressions. The repetitions of similar or entirely distinct shots within a single scene in Demons disrupt the linear narrative, illustrating the distortion of time and the inversion of life and death achieved through film editing. The exposure of the artificiality and plasticity of the images also serves as a critique of historicism in relation to the grand narrative. Double Suicide uncovers the hidden labor of puppeteers, who are deliberately ignored in Bunraku puppet performances and can be interpreted as representatives of the working class. These puppeteers are invisible to the diegetic world as they guide the human characters toward the conclusion of suicide, thereby implying the spectral nature of the unseen agents. On the one hand, the objectifying depictions of human beings in these two films are reminiscent of the Marxist critique of alienation, which aligns with the sociopolitical resistance movements of that time. On the other hand, by reducing human images to graphical elements, such as lines and color blocks, these cinematic portrayals render humans as manipulable and inorganic as non-human entities and inanimate objects. This simultaneously uncanny and visually pleasing aesthetic reflects the central idea of Object-Oriented Ontology, which considers all beings as objects.

In addition, the uncanny performativity exhibited by both films is closely tied to film as a medium. The perceivable cinematic apparatus functions as an interventional supernatural force, introducing a surreal dimension to the images. This paper further explores the connections between critical thoughts on the film medium’s potential and the aforementioned aesthetic expressions.