Melos in the World of K-Drama

Abstract

This essay elucidates the concept of the “affective interlude,” a moment in the K-drama that showcases emotion, typically of a character within the drama, while soliciting viewers to feel something, such as sympathy or outrage, in relation to it. This moment is emblematic of the poetics of the K-drama and exemplary of popular moving image narrative more generally. Part two of this essay considers the affective interlude in the context of its reproducibility. In doing so, we can begin to understand the K-drama as an aesthetic form that functions as an archive of Korean emotion.