Film, postmodernism and the sociological imagination : exploring the power of local stories in Southern Korea and Northern England

In this chapter our primary starting point is the conviction that the post-modern turn in social theory unlocked and valorised the potential of the creative arts and humanities for the sociological imagination. This legitimised a broader rejection than hitherto of those kinds of ‘scientifically’ based analyses which flattened out the rich complexity of social life. Postmodernism played a highly fruitful and productive role in the social sciences in valorising or re-valorising a long list of dimensions whose legitimacy had been in question. After postmodernism it has been far more difficult to simply dismiss the relevance and powers of, inter alia, phenomenology, hermeneutics and interpretation, emotionality, sensuality, a sense of place, social bonds, aesthetics, textuality, narrative and story-telling, a consciousness of time and history, nostalgia, values, and morality. In addition to its role in liberating these many rich dimensions of being, of ontology and the ontic, which had been secreted away and ignored or left underdeveloped, postmodernism also embodied a healthy scepticism towards claims to objective knowledge. The latter, in retrospect, was closely linked to the former. It was inevitable that postmodernism’s sensitivity to the greater complexity of being – which included the complicated relationship between being human and such things as meaning, embodiment, emotion and memory – would be mirrored by a greater sensitivity to the embeddedness of knowledge in this complexity, and thus to the ensuing partial and corrigible nature of all kinds of knowledge.