Literature & the Canon

Literary texts are not background to cinema. They are the inherited form of thought that every image carries inside it. Before the camera and long before the questionnaire, story was the technology a culture used to make its people, and the canon is the part of that record kept long enough to be checked. This is where CINEMAWORDS follows the classical traditions, Korean and otherwise, as far as they go — a nineteenth-century Joseon scholar’s complete poetic archive, a twentieth-century existentialist novel set in colonial Algeria, myths that still assign roles centuries after anyone stopped believing them. What survives a text’s moment, transformed, is what this section reads for, because what survives is what is still making people now.