This paper argues how the concept of melodrama can be articulated with the Affect Theory and Posthumanism in relation to animal or environment representation which have emerged as the new topics of the recent era. The argument will be made through the discussion of Agustin Zarzosa’s book, Refiguring Melodrama in Film and Television: Captitve Affects, Elastic Sufferings, Vicarious Objects. Using a genealogical approach, the book revisits the notion of mode, affect, suffering (hysteria), and excess which have been dealt with in the existing studies of melodrama. In chapter one, he broadens the concept of melodrama as a mode into the means of redistribution of suffering across the whole society in the mechanism of the duo of evil and virtue. It is the opposition of Brooks’s argument in which melodrama functions as the means of proving the distinction between evil and virtue. Chapter two focuses on the fact that melodrama is an elastic system of specification rather than a system of signification, with the perspective of Deleuzian metaphysics. Through the analysis of Home from the Hill (Vincente Minnelli, 1959), this chapter pays attention to an ‘affect’ generated by the encounters between the bodies and the Mise-en-Scène as a flow not of a meaning but of an affect. Chapter three argues that melodrama should reveal an unloved (woman’s) suffering, opposing the discussion on the role of melodrama as the recovery of moral order. Safe (Todd Haynes, 1995), dealing with female suffering caused by the industrial and social environment, elaborates on the arguments on melodrama in relation to female hysteria with ecocritical standpoints. The rest of the two chapters discusses the role of melodrama for the limitation and extension of the notion of the human through ‘animal’ and ‘posthuman’ melodrama. It argues that the concept of melodrama as ‘excess’ and ‘sacrifice’ blurs the boundary between human and inhuman. In summary, although the author Zarzosa partly agrees with Peter Brook’s notion of mode, affect and sufferings,he elaborates the concept of melodrama, by articulating philosophical arguments such as Deleuzianism, feminism, and posthumanism (Akira Lippit and Carry Wolf) with the melodrama. Thefore, Zarzosa challenges the concepts of melodrama led by Brooks, which had been canonical in the field.
수잔 헤이워드, 『영화사전: 이론과 비평』, 이영기 역, 한나래, 1997.
스테이시 앨러이모, 『말, 살, 흙: 페미니즘과 환경정의』, 윤준·김종갑 공역, 그린비, 2018.
피터 브룩스, 『멜로드라마적 상상력: 발자크, 헨리 제임스, 멜로드라마, 그리고 과잉의 양식』, 이승연·이혜령·최승연 공역, 소명출판사, 2013.
Ahn, Minhwa, “Broken Motherhood, National Allegories, and Transnational Hysteria in Postwar Japanese and Korean Melodramas: Cross-reading a Hollywood Case” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Forthcoming, 2019.
Copjec, Joan, “More From Melodramato Magnitude”, Endless Night, Janet Bergstrom (ed.), Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
Elsaesser, Thomas, “Tales of Sound and Fury: Observation on the Family Melodrama”, Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film, Christine Gledhill (ed.), London: British Film Institute, 1987.
Flatley, Jonathan, Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008.
Gledhill, Christine, “The Melodramatic Field: An Investigation”, Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film, Christine Gledhill (ed.), London: British Film Institute, 1987.
Gledhill, Christine, “Rethinking Genre”, Reinventing Film Studies, Christine Gledhill & Linda Willimas (eds.), London: Hodder Arnold, 2000.
Lippit, Akira Mizuta, Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.
Mulvey, Laura, “Social Hieroglyphics: Reflection on Two Films by Douglas Sirk”, Fetishism and Curiosity, London: British Institute, 1996.
Mulvey, Laura, “Delaying Cinema”, Deah 24 X a Second, Stillness and the Moving Image, London: Reaktion Books Ltd, 2006.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.
Willemen, Paul, “Negotiating the transition to capitalism: The case of Andaz”, Melodrama and Asian Cinema, Wimal Dissanayake (ed.), Cambridge University 1993.
Williams, Linda, “Melodrama Revised”, Refiguring American Film Genres, Nick Browne (ed.), Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.
Williams, Linda, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess”, Film Quarterly, Vol.44 No.4, 1991, pp.2-13.
Wolfe, Cary, Animal Rite: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.