In Search of New Horizons: One Hundred Years of Modern Korean Literature

“Seoul and Hometown (kohyang) in Yi Kwangsu’s Mujŏng (The Heartless, 1917) and Hŭk”

Yi Kwangsu’s Mujŏng (The Heartless, 1917), Korea’s first modern novel, is usually read as a paean to modernity and the enlightenment project.  Modern love, new education, interior character development, gender, and transitioning social mores – these are some of the more celebrated themes from this much-studied work.

This paper attempts a new, spatialized reading of the seminal text, focusing on the colonial writer’s shifting relationship to the city and countryside during the colonial period. To this end, I will also consider another major novel by Yi Kwangsu, Hŭk (The Soil, 1932), along with The Heartless, for what the two works reveal about the author’s northern hometown region of Chŏngju.  Seoul in 1917 was the Chosŏn dynastic (1392-1910) seat that was being transformed into the capital of the minjok and simultaneously into a colonial city-within-empire. Competing identities of nation versus empire dominated its surfaces, veiling the processes of “coming up” (上京) to capital from forgotten localities, when the truth was that many Seoulite writers were actually from provinces with regional affinities.  The Heartless testifies to this condition of alterity from as early as 1917, as does the much later work, The Soil, testifying to the complicated position of Sŏbugin (P’yŏngan province) writers living in Seoul.  The two novels show how memories of hometown persisted in literature through the layers of belonging haunting the colonial imagination.

Biography

Ellie Choi (PhD 2009, Harvard) is a literary and intellectual historian of modern Korea. Her book project, Space and National Identity: Yi Kwangsu’s Vision of Korea during the Japanese Empire, explores the relationships among space, cultural nationalism and historical identity. She is also working on a second book called, Interwar Reconstruction Movements and Yi Kwangsu’s ‘Minjok kaejoron’ (1922): an Introduction and Translation, on post 1919 illiberal modernisms in comparative global context. Dr. Choi’s current research interests include the Seoul city, the Diamond Mountains, visual culture, colonial tourism, and collaboration. She teaches classes on invented traditions of modern Korea, the Seoul city, and discovery of food and identity in contemporary Korean media. Before visiting at Smith, Dr. Choi was Assistant Professor of Korean Studies at Cornell University, and has also taught at Dartmouth, Yale, Harvard, Yonsei, and Ewha Colleges.

This abstract is forthcoming.

Click here to view Yuri Corrigan’s Bio.

“Time and Materials–The Matter of Poetic Expression in 1920s Korea”

This paper describes the socio-material characteristics of books of Korean poetry produced between 1921 and 1929 that are included in enumerative bibliographies of modern Korean poetry in order to ask two fundamental questions. Can the material characteristics of books of Korean poetry point at alternative scholarly approaches to the study of Korean literature by illuminating conceptual boundaries that have shaped thinking about Korean poetry from the early twentieth century? The second question concerns how periodization functions as a critical form in bibliographic and literary studies of modern Korean poetry. If periodization is a formal construct, “an abstract, transhistorical organizing principle,” (Levine 2016) can textual artifacts be read against the grain of this formal construct to help illuminate both the schema organizing conceptions of poetry from 1920s Korea and the books of poetry themselves? The paper proposes that the answer to the first question is yes; attentively reading the material circumstances of books of Korean poetry enumerated as such by Korean bibliographers can help to illuminate the conceptual assumptions that currently frame our understanding of the “modern period” in Korean poetry. The paper proposes that the answer to the second question is also yes. Books listed in bibliographies of modern Korean poetry can be read against the grain of the bibliographies’ organizing principles to suggest alternate organizational schema for describing the early modern period in Korean poetry. The paper’s central contention is that an investigation of the textual artifacts organized by enumerative bibliographies and narrative descriptions of Korean literary periods can help to clarify the conceptual boundaries that organize what we call modern Korean poetry and better describe the matter of poetic expression in 1920s Korea.

Biography

Wayne de Fremery is currently Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Global Korean Studies at Sogang University in Seoul and the author of a growing number of academic publications about Korean literature, bibliography, and the socialization of twentieth-century Korean literary texts. His book-length translation of poetry by Jeongrye Choi, Instances, appeared in 2011 from Parlor Press. Wayne’s work as a book designer and publisher received awards from the Independent Book Publishers Association and the Northern California Publishers & Authors Association. His artwork has appeared at several conferences and exhibitions, including HCI Korea 2014 and DAW BioArt Seoul 2015.

Click here to view Wiebke Denecke’s Bio.

Biography

Daisy Yan Du received her Ph.D. degree in Chinese Literature and Visual Culture and Ph.D. minor in English Literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in May 2012. Upon graduation, she worked as an Assistant Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in Chinese at the University of Miami in Florida. In August 2013, she started to work as an Assistant Professor in the Division of Humanities at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Clear Water Bay, Hong Kong. She has published articles on animation, film, gender, and popular culture in refereed journals, such as Positions: Asia Critique, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Gender & History, and Women’s Studies Quarterly. Her first book, entitled Animated Encounters: Transnational Movements of Chinese Animation 1940s-1970s, will be published by the University of Hawaii Press in 2018. She is currently building the Association for Chinese Animation Studies in Hong Kong, with the aim of introducing and promoting Chinese animation to the English-speaking world (http://acas.ust.hk/).

Click here to view Sarah Frederick’s Bio.

“Connections between Koreans in Japan and the Korean Peninsula, 1945-1952”

After the collapse of the Japanese Empire in August 1945, newly “liberated” Koreans faced the daunting task of constructing a new “national” culture and decolonized Korean subjectivity. Groups such the Korean Writers Alliance (Chosŏn Munhakka Tongmaeng) defined this project of decolonization as one that combined the dismantling of colonial hierarchical structures and institutions with a transformation in consciousness and subjectivity. Inspired by the efforts of the Korean Writers Alliance, Koreans in Japan sought to participate and contribute to the construction of a new national Korean culture. These attempts, however, were disrupted not only by the emerging “national” governments of Japan and the two Koreas, but also the US Military Occupation of Japan and southern Korea. Early on in the occupation, boundaries—such as those separating Koreans living on the peninsula and “Zainichi” (resident) Koreans—were porous, but as the Cold War order became entrenched and efforts to decolonize were suppressed or thwarted, the boundaries of nation, language, race, and ideological affiliation became rigid and exclusionary. In an attempt to understand the often overlooked post-liberation connections between Koreans in Japan and those on the peninsula, this article examines central literary figure Kim Tal-su (1919–1997) and Minshu Chōsen (1946–1950)—a magazine published by Koreans in postwar Japan.

Biography “TBA”

The Orthography and Style of Mujŏng (The Heartless, 1917) 

Abstract, TBA

Biography

Setsuko Hatano is Professor Emerita of the University of Niigata Prefecture. She is the author of Reading Mujŏng: Light and Darkness of Korean Reformist Literature [I Gwansu, “Mujō” no kenkyū : Kankoku keimō bungaku no hikari to kage ] (Tokyo: Hakuteisha, 2008),  A Study of Korean Writers who Studied in Japan [Ilbon yuhaksaeng chakka yŏn’gu] (Seoul: Somyŏng, 2011),  A Study of Modern Korean Literature: Yi Kwangsu,Hong Myŏnghŭi, Kim Tongin [kankoku kindai bungaku kenkyū : I Gwansu Hon myonhi Kimu don’in]  (Tōkyō : hakuteisha, 2013), and Yi Kwangsu: the Father of Modern Korean Literature and the Stigma of Being  Pro-Japanese [I gwansu : kankoku kindai bungaku no so to shin’nichi no rakuin] (Tokyo: chūkō shinsho, 2015). Her Japanese translations of modern Korean literature include Yi Kwangsu’s Mujŏng (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2005) and a collection of Kim Tongin’s short stories Kimu don’in sakuhinshū (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2011).  She is currently working on a project comparing modern Korean literature with its Taiwanese counterpart.

Biography

Seung-Hee Jeon is a literary scholar and critic as well as a leading contemporary translator of Korean literature. Her articles include War Trauma, Memories and Truths: Representations of the Korean War in Pak Wan-so’s Writings and Still Present Pasts: Korean Americans and the “Forgotten War”, published in the December 2010 issue of Critical Asian Studies. Her translations include the 2016 Man Booker Prize-winning novelist Han Kang’s Convalescence (2013) and Bang Hyeon-seok’s fiction Time to Eat Lobster (2016), which was selected for “75 Notable Translations of the Year” by World Literature Today. She has been honored with a Fulbright Grant, a Korea Foundation Fellowship, and two Daesan Foundation Translation grants (2011 and 2016). Based in both Boston and Seoul, she is a lecturer at Boston College and a senior editor at Asia Publishers.

Biography

Kim Dahye is a PhD candidate in the Department of East Asian Studies at McGill University. Before joining McGill, she received her MA and BA in Korean Literature from Yonsei University and spent a year as a Visiting Graduate Researcher in Korean Studies at UCLA. Her dissertation project focuses on online science fiction fandom in South Korea between 1987 to 1999. More broadly, she is interested in readership and viewership within the contemporary global media environment of South Korea. She has published articles on the colonial-era writer Yi T’aejun and on South Korean fan fiction of the film Inception.

“Reading the Enemy: North Korean Literature on the Fringes of the Canon” 

Section 7, Article 1 of the National Security Law of the Republic of Korea states that “any person who praises, incites or propagates the activities of an antigovernment organization, a member thereof or of the person who has received an order from it, or who acts in concert with it, or propagates or instigates a rebellion against the State, with the knowledge of the fact that it may endanger the existence and security of the State or democratic fundamental order, shall be punished by imprisonment for not more than seven years.” The “antigovernment organization” that the law refers to is North Korea, and ever since the establishment of South Korean in 1948, the National Security Law prohibited citizens from obtaining, reading, and distributing literature or any cultural products from the DPRK. In short, North Korean literature has been the target of “blacklisting” and absolute censorship from the very beginning. South Korean academic institutions and government organizations have consciously elided North Korean literature from the literary canon of what is unabashedly called “Korean Literature.” However, a movement in 1988 called “On Correctly Understanding North Korea” exposed North Korean literature to academics, students, and the general public during the period of democratization and serious discussions on reunification. Although the movement was short-lived, North Korean literary works that were reprinted in South Korea opened a window to the society and culture of the enemy state. This paper will examine some of the works of fiction that altered South Koreans’ view of North Korea through themes of family, friendship, and unification.

Biography

Immanuel Kim is Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies at Binghamton University SUNY. He received his PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Riverside. His research interests are in North Korean literature, culture, and film. His book Rewriting Revolution: Women, Sexuality, and Memory in North Korean Fiction will be published soon through University of Hawaii Press.

“Imagined Border Crossings in Mid-Century Korean Literature”

Since the 1945 division between South and North Korea, the literatures of each side diverged dramatically by propagating their own disparate state ideologies. While most writers promptly adapted to the new statist literatures, a few challenged the rigid ideological control over art and life. This essay focuses on attempts by writers, through their work, to criticize and resist the demarcation of the thirty-eighth parallel, the arbitrary border separating the nations. Short stories and novels by Yŏm Sangsŏp and Yi T’aejun often depict characters’ crossing the thirty-eighth parallel from south to north and vice versa, depictions which do not necessarily correspond to authors’ personal histories. This essay explores various implications of border-crossing as a literary trope, as well as a political and a real life choice of mid-century postcolonial writers. The imaginings of border-crossing in literature worked to refute and unsettle the Cold War binaries imposed on the Korean peninsula by expressing disbelief in the regime’s propaganda and repeatedly evoking the space beyond the border despite surface narratives denouncing the other regime. This essay illuminates the conflicts, complexities, and contestations in mid-century Korean literatures, much of which remain embedded to some degree in ideologically-bound perspectives, such as authors’ personal histories as wŏlbuk or wŏllam writers, or strong anticommunist trends in South Korean literature and the opposite in the literature of the North.

Biography

Ji Young Kim is Assistant Professor in the Department of Classical, Middle Eastern, and Asian Languages & Cultures at Queens College of the City University of New York. She is currently working on a book manuscript regarding representations of colonial collaboration and literature of decolonization in midcentury Korea. Her research and teaching interests include modern and contemporary Korean literature and culture, colonialism and empire, cultural Cold War, and autobiography and women’s writing in Korea and East Asia.

From Radio to Podcasts: A History of Listening in Sonic Narratives in Modern Korea

Click here to view bio

“Crossing the Great Divide: Midcentury Modernism on the Korean Peninsula”

Historians have recently called for a rethinking of mid-20th century Korean history, extending the rubric of total mobilization from the beginning of the second Sino-Japanese War in 1937 past the dramatic events of liberation from colonial rule and onto the end of active fighting in the civil war in the mid-1950s. Whereas total mobilization refers more commonly to the fascist era of Japanese imperialism, presumed to have ended with Japan’s defeat in war, recent scholarship argues for continuity across the colonial/postcolonial/Cold War divides marked by the formation of separate states on the peninsula in 1948. Such provocative polemics are highly suggestive for a reconsideration of Korean literary texts, which have been equally sundered by the history of division—both temporal and spatial—into an implacable contest between realism and modernism. The ideological contest is particularly intense in consideration of the work of those authors who literally walked across the divide of the hardening 38^th parallel in the late 1940s. This chapter considers the uncanny repetitions that mark their work in an attempt to rethink the structuring polarities of 20^th century Korean literary history. Can an expansive understanding of Total War, together with a reconsideration of modernism as a response to the multiple temporalities of global modernity, offer strategies to cross the great divide in the realm of aesthetics and politics?

Biography

Janet Poole teaches Korean literature and literary translation at the University of Toronto. Her exploration of Korean modernist writers’ response to Japanese fascist occupation during the Pacific War appeared as When the Future Disappears: The Modernist Imagination in Late Colonial Korea (Columbia University Press) and won the 2015 Modernist Studies Association Book Prize. She is translator of the mid-twentieth century writer Yi T’aejun and has published a collection of his anecdotal essays (Eastern Sentiments, Columbia University Press). A collection of Yi’s short stories written during the Pacific War and the early years of the Democratic People’s Republic will be published in 2018 as Dust and Other Stories.

“What is Literature? Topographies of Postwar South Korean Criticism”

“What is literature?” (Munhak iran hao), asked Yi Kwangsu in his famous essay of 1916, and for generations of South Korean critics since, the question has become the occasion not only for crystallizing their views on the nature of writing as a craft but for contemplating the conditions of possibility for literature to become a force for social change. From Kim Tongni’s primordial erotism to Paik Nak-chung’s (Paik Nakch’ŏng) division system, this essay examines reflections on the question of literature offered by six major South Korean intellectuals—Kim Hyŏn, Kim Uchang (Kim Uch’ang), Yu Chongho and Kim Yunsik, in addition to the two already named—in an effort to chart the topographies of postwar South Korean literary criticism. The works of six intellectuals are read in relation to both the explicitly acknowledged inspirations they drew from Tolstoy, Sartre, Kobayashi Hideo and the like, and the less avowed debt they owed to attempts by Yi Pyŏnggi and Cho Yunje to locate the essence of Korean literature in its classical traditions. This overview engages the various debates that structured the discursive field of Korean literature from the 1950s to the 1980s, including the generation debate and successive contestations between purism and engagement, modernism and realism, and minjok and minjung. In so doing, it explores how postwar South Korean literary criticism grappled with legacies of colonial modernity and arrived at a shared view of literature as the finest vessel to carry the spirit of its times.

Biography

Youngju Ryu is Associate Professor of Korean Literature at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Writers of the Winter Republic: Literature and Resistance in Park Chung Hee’s Korea and the editor of Cultures of Yusin: South Korea in the 1970s, forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press.

Click here to view Peter Schwartz’s Bio.

“New Media in South Korean Literature: The Reflexive Novelty of Digital Literacy”

Over the past two decades, the popularization of networked personal devices cultivated participatory dynamics that break from the stylistic bias toward unilateral elocution or the compulsion to frame individual lives within the context of grand narratives. PC communication services such as Nownuri, Chollian, and Hitel, for instance, sparked a robust subculture of genre fiction. The legacies of the cyberspace generation gave rise to a new wave of writers such as Young-ha Kim, Min-gyu Park, Yu-jung Jeong, Joong-hyuk Kim, and Ewhan Kim, who have been reclaiming alternative narrative strategies that transfuse vibrant new imaginaries drawn from pop culture and genre tropes into the long-standing tradition of critical realism in South Korean fiction. Mobile terminals powered by high-speed wireless connections are rendering literature instantaneous, ubiquitous, and cross-medial, catalyzing the production of new forms and genres while also rejuvenating elements of ‘old media’ as seen in the recent popularity of web novels, cross-media franchises, and the revival of historical fiction. Starting with an overview of the multivalent modality of digital literacy from the 1990s to the present, this essay explores how South Korean literature is adapting to, and in turn affecting the mediascape of our time by interfacing theories of new media with close readings of select works, including stories and novels by Min-gyu Park, Joong-hyuk Kim, Djuna, Naver web novels, and the TV drama W (2016). The criteria of newness are under constant revision. Rather than seeking definitive traits that distinguish current trends from pre-millennial literature, I suggest that the true novelty of such works must be located in their capacity to illuminate the inherent porosity of literature as not only representations of, but also critical reflections on and inspirations for reality.

Biography

Haerin Shin is Assistant Professor of English, with affiliations with Asian Studies and Cinema & Media Arts at Vanderbilt University. She received her Ph.D. in comparative literature (U.S.A., Korea, and Japan) from Stanford University in 2013. Shin’s research focuses on the relationship between technology and ontology, digital objects in the cultural domain, and issues of race and ethnicity. Shin has published articles on topics including posthuman spirituality (Symposium), techno-Orientalism (Dis-Orienting Planets), and cyberculture (Journal of Korean Studies, K –pop) and is currently editing Telos journal’s special issue on Korea (2018) while completing her first monograph The Technology of Presence: Being and Reality in the Age of Cyberculture.