“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.

The Korean Idiot:

Reading Yi Kwang-su through Dostoevsky

This paper will explore the striking textual resonances between Dostoevsky’s The Idiot (1869) and Yi Kwang-su’s Mujong (1917), asking how Yi’s borrowings from Dostoevsky can help shed light on both texts. Reading Dostoevsky through Yi allows us to see The Idiot more clearly as a national allegory for Russia’s confrontation with modernity, while examining Yi’s deviations from Dostoevsky places Yi’s distinctive vision for the forging of a new national Korean consciousness in sharper relief. Yi’s non-tragic resolution of Dostoevsky’s tragic love triangle calls attention to a series of foundational disagreements between the two writers regarding the role of Christianity in modernity, the problem of integrating cultural memory, and the question of the moral education of the self

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“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/).

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“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

The starting point of this talk is the well-accepted claim by Kim Yŏngmin that Mujŏng was originally written in the form that mixes Chinese and the Korean vernacular script, han’gŭl. In the first section, I introduce Kim Yŏngmin’s claim while explaining the duality of the orthography specific to turn-of-the-twentieth-century Korea, which originally grew out of two social classes. In section two, I suggest that the change of the orthography in Mujŏng was probably authorized by Nakamura Kentarō, the acting editor-in-chief of Maeil sinbo, while showing that Yi Kwangsu consciously started using han’gŭl in 1921 when he was writing the short story “Kasil” after coming back from Shanghai. In Section 3 I trace down the paths through which Yi Kwangsu reached the style of Mujŏng. Sensitive to the issue of style from the very beginning of his career as a writer, Yi Kwangsu developed a style close to the one uniting written Korean and spoken Korean in “A Young Boy’s Sacrifice “ and afterward continued to refine it through both translation and creative writings. Nonetheless, he was still adhering to the orthography of the mixed form. The staff of Maeil sinbo changed the orthography of Mujŏng from the mixed from to han’gŭl due to its own interests, but this switch did not create a problem because Yi Kwangsu’s writing had become comprehensible without the help of Chinese characters.

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.

“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.

Kim, Ji Young

“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

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

With the sharp visual turn in literary and media analysis, texts are often made to be inscribed and read rather than voiced or listened to. However, as Jonathan Sterne succinctly puts it, sound is just as an enduring “artifact of the messy and political human sphere,” through which we can hear new stories. In this essay, I seek to re-center voice, sound, and listening as ways to explore the cultural and political complexities of soundscape in modern Korean literature and culture.

To be sure, many new sound technologies have emerged in the twentieth century, but in this essay I hope to reassess modern Korean literary history along with materiality of the radio from the early twentieth century to the current century’s digital turn to podcasts (Internet). By tracing the history, culture, and technology of sound broadcasting and the programs they produced, I hope to work toward a new understanding of auditory histories and cultures as they relate not only to Korean literary productions but also to literary analysis, theory, and criticism. For this purpose, I will focus on three pivotal moments in Korean history when literature, sound technology, and sound became inescapably intertwined: the period of Japanese Total War Mobilization; the 1980s Democratization Movement in South Korea; and the mass candlelight demonstrations of the twenty-first century.

Biography

Jina E. Kim is a Visiting Associate Professor of East Asian Studies at Dickinson

College. Her research and teaching interests focus on the cultural history and

literary history of Korea from the late nineteenth century to the present with a particular emphasis on global and Korean modernisms, comparative colonialisms, intermediality, sound and visual studies. In addition to having published on Korean and East Asian film, literature, and culture, she is a co-editor of a special issue of the Journal of Korean Studies on Intermedial Aesthetics: Korean Literature, Film, and Art.

“Figure of the Translator: Kim Saryang between Modern Korean and Japanese Literature”

This chapter will examine the bilingual writings of colonial Korean writer Kim Saryang (1914-1950) as a case study to consider the broader context of imperial-language writing under colonialism. Kim’s literary works, translations, epistolary writings, and critical essays will be examined in tandem in order to consider the complexity of negotiations colonized cultural producers underwent in the highly controlled environment of writing under imperial policies of censorship and propaganda. The role of the colonial writer as a translator, in particular, will be explored through the examination of Kim the author as a translator between Korea and Japan, including his theories of translation as ethical and aesthetic praxis, as well as the figure of the translator that repeatedly emerge in many of Kim’s writings.

Biography

Nayoung Aimee Kwon is Associate Professor of Asian & Middle Eastern Studies, Program in the Arts of the Moving Image, and Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University. She is the author of Intimate Empire: Collaboration and Colonial Modernity in Korea and Japan(Duke University Press, 2015, Korean translation from Somyông Press 2018) and a co-editor (with Takashi Fujitani) of Transcolonial Film Co-productions in the Japanese Empire. Her publications have also appeared in The Journal of Asian Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Social Text, Sanghô Hakpo, Hanguk Munhak Yôngu, etc.

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“Decolonizing the Future: Postcolonial Science Fiction in South Korea”

Until recently postcolonialism has rarely been considered within Korean literary studies together with science fiction. Indeed, they seem to have little in common at first look: the former critically reflects on the past history of global imperialism and colonialism and their present consequences; the latter speculates alternate future possibilities. Yet the two actually share common interest in that they both probe the epistemological foundations of our spatial, temporal, and bodily experiences. This study seeks to bring together the critical insights of the two fields by reading South Korean science fiction through a postcolonial lens. Following a brief review of the recent productive intersections between postcolonialism and sf studies, it will offer two thematic sections of textual survey and analysis that respectively examine questions of nation/empire and issues of racial and ethnic identity within the science fiction of South Korea. Among the works to be discussed are some of the classics of the genre (Choi In-hoon’s Typhoon [1972] and Bok Geo-il’s In Search of an Epitaph [1987]) as well as more recent publications by writers such as Djuna, Pak Min-gyu, and Lim Taewoon. As the first part of the analysis will show, from the developmentalist fantasy of a cosmopolitan technoutopia to dystopian visions of an apocalyptic nation, the genre of science fiction has long been a site of contention among competing visions for South Korea as a nation engaged in its own decolonization. Moreover, as will be suggested in the second part of the analysis, through its biopolitical speculations on tropes such as postnational cyborgs and creolized aliens, the genre has also come to fruition in the contestation of racial and ethnic discrimination and hierarchies both globally and in the local settings of Korea and East Asia.

Biography

Sunyoung Park is Associate Professor of East Asian languages and cultures and gender studies at the University of Southern California. She is the author of The Proletarian Wave: Literature and Leftist Culture in Colonial Korea, 1910-1945 (Harvard University Asia Center, 2015) and the editor and translator of On the Eve of the Uprising and Other Stories from Colonial Korea (Cornell East Asian Series, 2010). She is currently editing Ready-Made Bodhisattva and Other Science Fiction Stories from South Korea (Kaya Press, 2018) and is also working on a monograph on science fiction and the politics of modernization in South Korea.

Samuel Perry is associate professor of East Asian Studies at Brown University. His published work includes the monograph Recasting Red Culture in Proletarian Japan: Childhood, Korea and the Historical Avant-garde (Univ. of Hawai’i, 2014), and two books of translation from Korean and Japanese, From Wŏnso Pond by Kang Kyŏng-ae (The Feminist Press, 2009) and Five Faces of Japanese Feminism: Crimson and Other Works by Sata Ineko (Univ. of Hawai’i, 2016). He is currently writing a monograph about Japanese literature at the time of the Korean War and translating a collection of queer Korean literature.

“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.

A Nation (?), in Love and in Print: Mujong and Werther as “First Modern Novels”

The “first modern Korean novel,” Yi Kwang-su’s Mujong (1917), shares multiple similarities with a book that – although it has never been called “the first modern German novel” – was certifiably the first German novel to become a European bestseller: Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). Common characteristics include weak male protagonists, the thematization of suicide, projections of interiority onto landscape, direct or indirect mapping of problems of nationhood onto romantic love triangles, nuclear-family issues, problems of class difference provoked by overall changes in social structure, a focus on problems of education, implicit references to internationally dominant outside cultures considered politically and culturally advanced by a developing local culture and therefore normative, the dramatization of certain problems of middle-class world-constitution through texts, and the emergence of both works into new media situations that provoked an unprecedented intensity of public engagement with them. My talk will try to show how many or all of these characteristics may be somehow related: that is, to show structurally comparable connections between the ways Mujong and Werther thematize typically modern relationships of love, family, nationhood, social class, reference and local cultures, and historically new media situations.

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.

Biography

Mi-Ryong Shim is Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at Northwestern University. She is a specialist in modern Korean literature and culture, with research and teaching interests in postcolonial studies, film and visual culture, and translation studies. She is currently working on a book monograph that examines how works of late colonial period Korean literary and visual arts adapted the transnational discourse of Pan-Asian cultural regionalism. She received her PhD from Columbia University and was a Korea Foundation postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University.

“Hansi as National History:

Publishing The Anthology of Poetry of the Great Eastern Nation (1918)”

The essay examines discussions on taxonomy by the editors and publisher of the first modern anthology of historical works of literature by the Korean writers, titled, Taedong sisŏn, or the Anthology of Poetry of the Great Eastern Nation (1918), which assembles the poems in Chinese (hansi) by over 2,000 poets throughout Korea’s history from around the second century BCE to the 1900s. With a leading figure of the nationalist movement, Chang Chiyŏn, as the chief editor, it was published by Sinmun’gwan, the publishing house founded and operated by Ch’oe Namsŏn. The extensive scope of Taedong sisŏn was unprecedented, but the true invention of this anthology is in its taxonomic construction. Notwithstanding the traditional convention of organizing the poems in Chinese according to the genres and rules of versification in classical Chinese poetry, it registers the poems under the names of the poets, irrespective of the hereditary social status and gender, and arranges them in a chronological order, following the history of the Korean people since the Old Chosŏn antiquity. By means of this taxonomy, the anthology claims to represent the nation as a poetically homogeneous entity across history with its unique tone distinct from that of the Chinese or the Japanese. Centering on the poetics of homogeneity that sanctions the organization of the poems in Chinese in Taedong sisŏn, my analysis considers theories, practitioners, and a definition of the genre, of poetry, implied in the publication. Against the still predominant understanding of an abrupt demise of poetry in Chinese in early twentieth-century Korea, and an attendant assumption of the categorical replacement of the “premodern” to the “modern,” the essay seeks to show a glimpse into the far more complex picture of complicity, and porous boundaries, among the aesthetic, linguistic, and social categories that shaped Korean literature in the early twentieth century.

Biography

Jiwon Shin is Assistant Professor in the School of International Letters and Cultures at Arizona State University. Her main field of interest is hanmun literature of early modern Korea with a focus on travel writing, antiquarian texts, and manuscript culture. Her research makes occasional excursions into poetry and visual culture of contemporary Korea. She has published on antiquarian collecting in the late Chosŏn period, nineteenth-century urban literati culture in Korea and China, and modern poetry.

“To be a Citizen in the ‘World of Language’

: Choi In-hoon and Cosmopolitan Literary Practices in South Korea”

This study aims to examine the development and transformation of cosmopolitanism in South Korea and its vital role in (re)constructing the cultural identity of Korean writers within a postcolonial context. South Korean literary writers cultivated a cosmopolitan ethos when the ruling powers were heavy-handedly leading economic growth under the flag of anti-communism and developmentalism. Even though fueled by historical incidents such as the Vietnam War, Nixon’s 1972 visit to China, and the fall of the communist bloc, their version of cosmopolitanism was often entrenched with a self-contradictory attitude combining admiration for the West with hostility toward it as well as toward comprador capitalists in South Korea. Then, what did it mean for Korean writers to claim themselves to be cosmopolitan during the Cold War era? What might have stopped some of them from doing so? How did they cope with the discrepancy between their cosmopolitan ethos and nationalism? I try to answer these questions by analyzing Choi In-hoon’s literary works as a striking example of cosmopolitan literary practices in postwar South Korea though the lens of recent theories of cosmopolitanism. This presentation pays close attention to the Choi’s latest novel The Keyword (Hwadu).By shifting the focus from the binary opposition of nationalism and socialism to the subtle tension between universalism and cosmopolitanism, this paper hopes to offer a new way to appreciate the richness of literary texts in post war Korea.

Biography

Youkyung Son is Associate Professor of the Department of Korean language and literature at Seoul National University. She received her Ph.D. from Seoul National University with the dissertation entitled “Ethics and Aesthetics of Sympathy in Modern Korean Literature” in 2006. Her research has focused on socialist literature in Korea during the colonial period. Dr. Son published books such as The Structure of Sensibility in Modern Korean Proletarian Literature (2012) and Sorrowful Socialists (2016). She is currently conducting research about dissident literature under the military dictatorship 1970s~1980s and the feminist theories and movements from late 1980s to early 1990s in South Korea.

“Zainichi Writers and the Postcoloniality of Modern Korean Literature”

Although the literary texts produced by members of the Korean minority in Japan—“Zainichi” literature—has typically been studied by scholars of Japanese literature, these texts are increasingly of interest to the field of Korean literature as well. Even as this move potentially troubles the nation-state framework of modern Korean literature by expanding its boundaries to include the diaspora, it risks reinforcing the ethnocentrism embedded in the logic of national literature. Nevertheless, weaving Zainichi literature into the larger fabric of postwar Korean literature can act as an antidote to the tendency of Cold War South Korean nationalist narratives to disavow the inconvenient truths of Korea’s colonial period literary history, including a thriving leftist literary scene, pro-Japanese collaboration, and writing in the language of the colonizer.

This paper draws from the critical writings of three authors active in the late colonial period and the early years of the postwar, Kim Saryang, Chang Hyŏkju (later Noguchi Minoru), and Kim Talsu. Rather than asking how each positioned himself vis-a-vis Japan, I focus on how these writers positioned themselves within the framework of modern Korean literature, particularly with respect to the origins of modern Korean literature under the conditions of colonial modernity. I argue that Zainichi literature can be seen as one of many alternate futures for colonial period Korean literature, no less valid than postwar South Korean literature as its heir.

Biography

Cindi Textor is Assistant Professor of Japanese literature and culture in the Department of World Languages and Cultures at the University of Utah. Her research focuses on the problem of assimilation and representations of difference in writing by Zainichi and colonial Koreans.

Biography

Karen Thornber is Professor of Comparative Literature and of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University, where she also serves as Victor and William Fung Director of the Harvard University Asia Center. She is the author of two multiple international award-winning scholarly monographs – Empire of Texts in Motion (2009) and Ecoambiguity (2012) – as well as 70 articles/book chapters on comparative and world literatures, environmental and medical humanities, gender, indigeneities, transculturation (translation), trauma, and the literatures and cultures of China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and the Indian Ocean Rim. Thornber is also co-editor of four volumes and is an award-winning translator of Japanese literature.

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“Migration, Bordering, and the Regional Imaginary in Colonial Period Frontier Literature”

The frontier literature about the Kando region in Northeast Manchuria, including the short stories and novels of Ch’oe Sŏhae and Kang Kyŏng-ae, hold a unique and important status in the history of Korean-language literature of the Japanese colonial period. On both the political right and the political left—from Yi Kwangsu’s cultural nationalism to Im Hwa’s ideas about transplantation—the question of how to create a Korean national literature was central to the theories and practices of poetry and fiction writing in the 1920s and 1930s. However, ideas of the nation and national literature were accompanied by concepts of space, time, and representation that delimited what would qualify as proper content for national literature. Although anarchist writers like Ch’oe Sŏhae were directly influenced by Yi Kwangsu’s mode of national allegory, and feminist socialist writers like Kang Kyŏng-ae drew from the aesthetic theories of Im Hwa and other KAPF figures, their works and Kando literature (kando munhak) more generally provide a very different perspective on colonial Korean society. As a frontier literature dealing with the peripheries of the Japanese empire and colonial Korea, the representations of borders, migration, revolution, ethnicity, and labor in Kando literature breaks dramatically from the ideal wholes valued by theorists of national literature and national subjectivity, and focuses instead on the extremes of fragmentation and suffering caused by the colonial economic system’s uprooting of traditional social structures and the creation of the frontier as a horizon of both escape and false hope. I will examine both the gritty realism and the utopianism (including powerful fantasies of national or regional liberation) that characterizes this literature’s alternative view of the colonial period.

Biography

Travis Workman is Associate Professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities and the author of Imperial Genus: The Formation and Limits of the Human in Modern Korea and Japan.

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The forever contested beginning of the modern: Liang Qichao’s The Future Record of New China and Lu Xun’s “A Madman’s Diary.”

In the history of modern East Asian literature, the question occupies much scholarly attention novel might be regarded as the beginning of the new novel or the modern novel. The issue is important because it supposedly marks the moment of transformation and of breaking with the past with a new writing style and a new world outlook. In Japan, Futabatei Shimei’s The Drifting Cloud (Ukigumo 浮雲, 1887) has often been called the first Japanese modern novel, while others tied this beginning to the appearance of the I-novel, watakushi shôsetsu. In China Lu Xun’s A Madman’s Diary (Kuangren riji 狂人日記，1918) enjoys that position and in Korea, Yi Kwang-su’s Mujông (The Heartless), begun in 1917, has generally been accepted as the first Korean modern novel. Yet, when we examine the lifeworld of East Asian literature, the very notion of the “first” is problematic as is the notion of hard national borders identifying these novels as belonging to a particular nation as part of its identity. My paper will probe the question whether literary innovation can meaningfully be dated, and dated within a context of “national” literature.

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“Co-Mixing Korean War Memories: Witness, Survival and Archive in Yoon Tae-ho’s Graphic Novel Narrative Operation Chromite”

This paper examines Yoon Tae-ho’s history comic Operation Chromite (Inch’ŏn sangnyuk chakchŏn, 2013–14) to discuss the remediation of Korean War memories in South Korea in the 2010s. In recalling Korea’s division as the origin of current absurdities, Operation Chromite, serialized in “post-sunshine” South Korea, engages with two challenges: one is the non-representability of extreme events, further complicated by the “reification power” of comics as a cultural commodity; the other is the historical specificity of the Korean War, which has remained in a volatile stalemate for more than six decades. To take on these representational and historical challenges, Operation Chromite deploys varied formal and narrative strategies to draw Korea’s unfinished war. On the one hand, it inherits the legacies of minjung historiography and division literature as it narrates the chaos of postliberation Korea from the perspective of the marginalized and through the trope of the broken family. On the other hand, it utilizes the hybrid quality of comics in interweaving the imaginary and the documented, and offers multiple angles from which to re-collect the fragmented pieces of collective memory. Particularly concerned with the experience of “witnessing” the Korean War that is initiated by this “co-mix” form, I trace how a kaleidoscopic view of the history of Korea’s division arises out of this mixture of the spectacle and the archive. In doing so, I further explore the work’s affective rendering of the survival tactics practiced by ordinary people in a war situation, including their “espionage” activities.

Biography

We Jung Yi is Assistant Professor of Asian Studies and Comparative Literature at the Pennsylvania State University. She is currently working on her book project Diverging Memories, which explores Korea’s unfinished war through various forms of cultural remembrance in South Korea. Her recent works include “Trans-Memory, Suspended Time, and the Pleasure of Mourning: Korean War Blockbusters in Post-Cold War South Korea” (Cinema Journal, forthcoming) and “Melodramatic Tactics for Survival in the Neoliberal Era: Excess and Justice in The Heirs and My Love from the Star” (The Journal of Korean Studies, forthcoming).