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As in the Western world, Korea has a variety of mythical monsters. Among them is Bulgasari, an iron-eating monster, which will be the main topic of this paper. The monster’s name “Bulgasari” has a paradoxical meaning in Korean, which is “cannot be killed but can be killed by fire.” The meaning of the name represents the wide gamut of ambivalent identity ranging from physical to metaphorical aspects of the monster. It also provides a uniquely Korean reception and interpretation of being monstrous as distinctive from the archetypal imagery and general understanding of monstrosity as “enduring evil,” as seen in most myths and tradition. For instance, Bulgasari’s destructive power is frequently portrayed in the myth as a heroic trait to protect social justice by condemning and punishing the evils of society. Such an ambivalent identity as both monster and hero shows that Bulgasari’s embodiment of monstrosity is recognized through a different or rather complex mechanism in Korean-specific context, not uniformly recognized as enduring evil. This study traces historical descriptions of the monster Bulgasari in legend, literature, and film adaptation. Especially focusing on the North Korean film Bulgasari (1985), this study explores the way in which the ambivalent identity of the monster develops into discourses of humanity and pacifism, in both Korean-specific and transnational contexts, while mirroring the Korean and global sense of reality situated in this era of South-North division and nuclear holocaust.

Most digital brain atlases have macroscopic resolution and are confined to a single imaging modality. Here we present a new kind of resource that combines dense maps of anatomy and physiology at cellular resolution. The resource encompasses almost 400 ganglion cells from a single patch of mouse retina, and a digital “museum” provides a 3D interactive view of each cell’s anatomy as well as graphs of its visual responses. To demonstrate the utility of the resource, we use it to divide the inner plexiform layer of the retina into four sublaminae defined by a purely anatomical principle of arbor segregation. We also test the hypothesis that the aggregate neurite density of a ganglion cell type should be approximately uniform (“density conservation”). Finally, we find that ganglion cells arborizing in the inner marginal sublamina of the inner plexiform layer exhibit significantly more sustained visual responses on average.

Traditional theatre scholarship maintains that Chosun-era Korean theatrical forms are rooted deep in the collectivity of the minjung —the economically, socially, and politically deprived—and are essentially minjung theatricalities. While the forms performed and viewed by commoners, such as talchum (mask dance), pansori (epic song performance), geurimja-geuk (shadow drama), and inhyeong-geuk (puppet show), are well researched, theatres of the privileged class or yangban have been obscured and consequently ignored by Korean theatre scholars. Gwolhui (moot royal court play), performed by the Confucian students of the Sungkyunkwan, the national university of the Chosun dynasty, offers evidence of a theatre of the privileged class. Gwolhui shares characteristics found in minjung theatre—collective participation, episodic structure, and bottom-up satire of the society. It is the yangban counterpart to the minjung theatrical forms and, therefore, should be considered part of the Korean theatre tradition.