Representation of South-Korean Pop-Culture in English-language Media: Orientalist Discourse

In the last two decades, Korean pop-culture has gradually become to be a prominent player in the transnational cultural sphere, exerting influence via a soft power approach. Products of the Korean Wave have entered the domain of global mainstream culture, which has historically been dominated by The West. This paper aims to analyse English-language journalistic coverage of Korean pop-culture by using the Orientalist approach, which was first proposed by Edward Said in 1978. By applying critical discourse analysis and content analysis, this study examines press articles on the Korean Wave from 2011 to 2020. The research has shown that the media use three rhetoric approaches when covering Hallyu: the “star factory” rhetoric, the “conquer/surrender” rhetoric and the “authenticity" rhetoric. It was found out that (1) the three rhetorics are interconnected and influence each other, (2) the most commonly employed rhetoric changes year by year and (3) the rhetorics have orientalist roots.