Watching to Feel in Korean TV Romance

This book presents a psychosocial investigation of the Vietnamese audience reception of romantic Korean television dramas (K-drama), a genre central to the global spread of South Korean pop culture known as the Korean Wave. Featuring case studies of individual viewing experiences of male and female participants interviewed in 2019, it focuses on the themes of lack and play conceptualised by Jacques Lacan and Donald Winnicott, alongside ideas from other influential psychoanalytic thinkers. It unravels the impact of Korean television romance, which has established an enduring presence in Vietnam since the late 1990s. This development has taken place amid the country’s transition towards capitalist-driven socio-economic tendencies and influenced local viewers’ explorations of romantic emotions imbued with loss, longing, and nostalgia, and of softened masculinities. The study adopts a psychosocial approach marked by the psychoanalytically informed biography-based ‘free association' narrative interview model and interdisciplinary interpretive methods involving sociology, psychology, psychoanalysis, and cultural studies. This engaging work offers fresh insights into a cultural phenomenon that appeals to scholars across the social sciences, particularly those working in media audience research, psychoanalysis, gender studies, the Korean Wave, and Vietnamese studies.