Othering New Women: A Multimodal Approach to The Hymn of Death

Abstract

This paper takes a multimodal approach to analyze both linguistic and non-linguistic resources represented in a Korean program, The Hymn of Death (2018), with an aim to discover how a multimodal discourse reshapes the way we perceive our society, especially women. The backdrop of this series is set in the 1920s in Korea. This period represents a transition toward modernity in which women were given the opportunity to study and work. This small group of young women were called 'new women.' With male-centered thumbnails and descriptions which are interlaced together in each episode, The Hymn of Death exhibits the patriarchal culture at the time when a new woman remains absent or invisible as an other.

Keywords

• Othering
• new women
• multimodal discourse
• colonial Korea
• Korean Netflix series
• The Hymn of Death