[KS] Call for Panelists: “We Know How This Ends: Narrative Pleasure for Knowing Audiences” (AKSE 2027)

[김강은]

Dear colleagues,

I am seeking participants for a panel proposal for the 33rd Conference of the Association for Korean Studies in Europe (AKSE), to be held at the University of Bucharest, Romania, from 24 to 27 June 2027.

Panel title:
“We Know How This Ends: Narrative Pleasure for Knowing Audiences in Korean Literature and Media”

Organizer:
PhD. Kim, Kang-eun (Research Professor, Sungkyunkwan Univ.)

This panel begins with a seemingly simple question: What do readers and audiences enjoy when they already know how a story ends?
The proposed topic arises from several conspicuous tendencies in contemporary Korean narrative culture. Classical and traditional narratives, as well as other widely familiar stories, continue to be retold and transformed. In contemporary Korean literature—particularly web novels—regression, possession or transmigration, and reincarnation have emerged as prominent narrative devices. At the same time, adaptations, remakes, remediation, and other forms of transmedia storytelling frequently move stories across literature, webtoons, film, television, games, performance, and popular music. These phenomena repeatedly place readers and audiences in a position of prior knowledge: they may already know the ending, the source narrative, the historical event, the genre convention, or an earlier version of the story.

Rather than treating such foreknowledge as an obstacle to suspense, this panel explores it as a condition that generates distinctive forms of narrative pleasure, including anticipation, recognition, comparison, reinterpretation, and critical reflection. When the outcome or narrative pattern is already known, readers and viewers may focus less on what will happen and more on how, why, and through which variations it happens. Repetition may consequently become a source of pleasure rather than redundancy, while deviations from a familiar narrative may acquire heightened significance.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

retellings and transformations of classical, traditional, or otherwise familiar narratives;

regression, possession or transmigration, reincarnation, return, and recursive narratives in web novels and other forms of contemporary literature;

adaptation, remake, remediation, and transmedia storytelling;

historical fiction, films based on true events, and the consumption of cultural memory;

genre conventions and knowledgeable reader or fan communities;

spoilers, anticipation, rereading, and rewatching;

meta-narrative, intertextuality, allusion, and recognition;

differences between knowing and unknowing audiences across cultural or linguistic contexts.



The panel welcomes research on premodern, modern, or contemporary Korean literature and culture. Relevant materials may include fiction, film, television, webtoons, web novels, games, performance, and popular music. Comparative and transmedia approaches are also welcome, provided that Korea remains central to the paper.

Doctoral candidates, postdoctoral researchers, and other early-career scholars are particularly encouraged to respond. The panel aims to bring together participants from different institutions, regions, disciplines, and career stages.

My own paper examines the pleasures of reading Korean classical narratives whose conclusions are already known. It asks how foreknowledge redirects readers’ attention from the final outcome to narrative process, variation, repetition, and recognition.

Those interested in joining the proposed panel are invited to submit the following:
  a provisional paper title; an abstract of approximately 300 words; a short biography

Please send your proposal to pinktokki at skku.eduby 30 August 2026.

Please feel free to circulate this call among colleagues and research networks that may be interested.

Best Wishes, 
Kim, Kang-eun



김강은(Kim Kang-eun)
혁신·공유·정의 지향의 한국어문학 교육연구단 / 연구교수

서울시 종로구 명륜3가 성균관대학교 25-2 다산경제관 32201호
Website https://sites.google.com/view/kangeunkim/home
Mobile +82-10-5183-5354 Email pinktokki at skku.edu



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