Awakening from Ruin: Ch’oe Inhun and the Unfulfilled Bildungsroman of the 1960s Intellectual
We Jung Yi, Penn State University
This paper seeks to expand and complicate traditional readings of Choi In-hun (1936-) by situating his works within a constellation of trans/national realities, literary engagement, and gender politics. Beginning with The Square (1960), his epoch-making work of South Korea’s division literature, Choi’s novels convey a tragic vision that the 4.19 generation pursued to redeem the uncompleted revolution of 1960 as their divided nation underwent violent modernization under military dictatorship. Despite suggesting a third way to move beyond the bipolarized world of the Cold War era, in Choi’s literature, such an awakening from ruins, often materialized through a romantic relationship, remains problematic in terms of gender. His female characters, while identified with incomprehensible excess that challenges the male protagonists’ intelligence, are always “embraced” as the very medium through which the intellectual subject can reach the third space beyond the division of the private and the public, or the South and the North. Thus my exploration of Choi’s unfulfilled Bildungsroman foregrounds the place of the woman who is always located at the intersection of the male protagonist’s double failure: failure in both Bildung (the formation of the modern subject) and romance (the construction of an alternative community).
Placing North Korean Literature in Korean Studies
Immanuel J. Kim, Binghamton University SUNY
There has been a growing interest in North Korean history, literature, and cinema in recent scholarship. However, despite the increasing number of articles, conference panels, and monographs on North Korea, scholarship on the DPRK remains divided or differentiated from “Korean Studies.” The moniker “North Korean literature” is not a geographical difference (e.g. literature from the northern region of Korea) but a political one (e.g. literature that is ideologically different from the South). The purpose of this paper is to work collectively with the members of the Korean Literature Association to find a place for North Korean scholarship to dwell and function in Korean Studies. It is intended to project the possibility or the practicality (i.e. translations, pedagogy, and research breath) of North Korean studies in Korean Studies. I believe a serious discussion on North Korean history, literature, and cinema is necessary to gauge the future of Korean Studies in the United States.
Redacted Autobiography, Forced Decolonization in Yi T’aejun’s Early North Korean Literature
Ji Young Kim, University of Chicago
Focusing on early North Korean publications (1945-1950)—specifically, Yi T’ae-jun’s literary works published after his migration to the north—this paper aims to explore a Korean writer’s postcolonial attempt to resist against the (neo)colonial reality in the literary interstices between decolonization and the Cold War. While Yi T’ae-jun’s “Before and After Liberation” (1946) is widely considered to be a valuable literary testimony of a writer’s colonial experience and the post-1945 Korean literary world, what is less known is that Yi made some revisions to the text when he included it in his 1949 short-story collection. By analyzing both versions of the story, this paper investigates how the memory of the colonial past—especially of collaboration—was, or had to be, changed in 1949 North Korea, and how the nation’s cultural policies affected literary production. Also, by paying attention to the parts that Yi left unrevised, the paper traces Yi’s discordance and challenge to state policy. In doing so, this paper explores how the postcolonial matters of decolonization and the Cold War were intertwined in Yi’s literature.
Imagined Geography as Ethical Utopia: Envisioning Worlds in Late Chosŏn Literature
Sookja Cho, Arizona State University
This paper explores the portrayals of China, Japan, and the world order in Late Chosŏn fiction, focusing on works such as Chusaeng-jŏn, Ch’oe Ch’ŏk chŏn, and Nam Yun chŏn which are set against the backdrop of the 16th-17th C. Japanese and Manchu invasions. It analyzes the treatment of spatial distance and mobility between characters, locations, and events in the context of expanding East Asian geopolitics. By scrutinizing the characters’ attitudes towards foreign peoples and lands, it illuminates the conceptual and emotional borderland of the pre-modern Korean audience. In these Korean fictional narratives, China, Japan, and the rest of the world are depicted as an open, borderless, inter-communicative, physically accessible, culturally engaging place without sociopolitical and ethnic boundaries. As a result, the literary representation of the outside world in these works narrows the distance between cultures by prioritizing shared values and a common faith in humanity rather than bolstering the existing, often contentious, world order. This paper suggests a nuanced understanding of the Korean view of the self, the state, and the world during the Late Chosŏn, a more generous, more humane view of geo-political space than has previously been taken.
Rethinking the ‘Sinographic Sphere’ through the Poetics of Japanese and Korean Chronicles
Wiebke Denecke, Boston University
Sheldon Pollock’s magisterial vision of a “Sanskrit cosmopolis,” which spread through South Asia during the first millennium CE, when Sanskrit was reinvented as a literary and political language, and was challenged during the second millennium by the rise of local vernaculars, has recently inspired scholars of East Asia to think more seriously about the complex dynamic between “cosmopolitan” and “vernacular” languages in the political, cultural, literary, and religious arenas of East Asia’s “Sinographic Sphere.” In this paper I showcase the urgency and great potential of this question by comparing the use of poetry in Japanese and Korean historical chronicles (Kojiki and Nihon shoki; Samguk sagi and Samguk yusa). The paper explores what the divergences between the Japanese and Korean chronicles in their patterns of language choice of Chinese-style versus vernacular genres, in their use of poetry in the portrayal of diplomacy between the East Asian states, and their dynamic of poetry exchanges reveal about differences in Japanese and Korean literary cultures. Setting aside questions of historical influence, which keeps paralyzing comparative research on early and medieval Korea and Japan, this paper makes a methodological case for comparing them instead as parallel cases of cultural appropriation in the Sinographic Sphere.
British-Korean Encounters: Late-Chosŏn Diplomacy and 1930’s Medievalism
Sophie Bowman, Ewha Womans University
This paper examines I Chongŭng’s (1853-1920) Syŏyugyŏnmunnok, which recounts his travels to London for the coronation of King Edward VII in 1902 in shi-ga form, alongside the poems of Joan S. Grigsby (1891-1937) written during her two year sojourn in Korea from 1929-1932. I Chongŭng perceived Great Britain as a country ‘further along’ in the process of modernization. He experienced awe and amazement at such things a cross-country trains and the busy London traffic and began to long for the modernization of his homeland. To Joan Grigsby however, the modernization of Great Britain was a process of terrible loss. When Joan arrived in Korea in 1929 she immediately became interested in traditional Korean poetry (in translation) and wrote her own poems exploring the vestiges of pre-modern culture which she found in the streets of Seoul. While the creative efforts of these two poets are separated by almost three decades, by examining their works together we can appreciate the complex values of modernization as experienced differently by different actors in different cultural contexts, whereby Joan Grigsby sought to rediscover something lost in the land of I Chongŭng who himself sought to improve conditions in his homeland inspired by his travels.
Mobility on Track: Locomotive Modernity in Colonial Korean Cinema
Han Sang Kim, UC San Diego
The parallelism and parallelization of train and cinema in colonial Korea should be understood as the cultural logic of mobilization. The colonial authorities’ use of film as a means of making people recognize the gaze of the ruler and letting them become recognizable by the ruler was a technology of government used to mobilize colonial subjects, sharing the cultural logic with the railway system to construct the “ocular domination” (Fujitani 1996, 25) of the colonial power. I call the disciplining process that induced the people to internalize such subjugation locomotive modernity.
The major features of locomotive modernity are collectivity, centrality, and regularity. The interface between train and cinema coerced people into sharing the same points of departure and destination. The train routes illustrated in the cinematic imagination shaped the spatial composition of the Empire where the future was seen to be possible only through collective dreaming. The collectivity of the forward movement generated simultaneously both the centripetal force toward Tokyo and the centrifugal force toward untapped territories. In this imperializing movement, the timetabling of train and cinema constituted regularity and stability.
This paper analyzes feature films produced in colonial Korea to illustrate these characteristics of locomotive modernity.
Sapphic Marriage and Fairytales of the Self-made Man
Yoon Sun Yang, Boston University
Kim Kyoje’s new fiction (sinsosŏl) Flowers in the Mirror (1923) calls our attention with its portrayal of a same-sex marriage between two women. Their radical decision to form an all-female alternative family after being divorced by the same man invites us to revisit the prevalent assumption in Korean literary history: as domestic fiction mainly targeted toward uneducated, old-fashioned women, new fiction is at best only “insufficiently” modern. However, though without the figure of kaein (individual) with interiority—allegedly a key sign of “fully-fledged” modern fiction, Flowers in the Mirror portrays kaein as the agent of human rights instead of as a unique being. The three main characters (the two women and their ex-husband) of this story equally struggle to exercise their human rights through the pursuit of modern education, property, and happiness while revealing gender differences in the process of becoming kaein. The two female protagonists create a home that lives up to the ideals of equality and solidarity; their ex-husband embodies the myth of the self-made man. Far from merely entertaining old-fashioned readers, thus, new fiction like Flowers in the Mirror explores a major subject in modern world literature—prospects and disparities of a society made up of free individuals.
Representing Transnational Women in 1950s South Korea
Yunji Park, University of Southern California
The 1950s has been regarded as a barren decade in Korean history when culture was limited to expressing the hardship of postwar years. Such evaluation, however, is largely based on studies of male intellectual scholarship. Economically more empowered than previous times, women figured in contemporary cultural discourses more conspicuously than ever, embodying conflicting social values. In my analysis, I examine three distinctive ideals of womanhood that prevailed in the decade’s popular literature, film, and theater: Madame Freedom, the Après Girl, and the Girl Prince. My discussion argues that these ideals variously projected and embodied the period’s intense aspirations for and anxieties about modernization, democracy, and individual freedom. In embedding my analysis in the historical context of 1950s Korea, I observe not only the resonance of these three ideals with local women’s life experiences but also their indebtedness to transnational inspirations. What particular international cultural forces contributed to giving rise to these popular ideals of womanhood? My analysis will bring to light the transnational complexity of the decade’s popular culture, as it maps the interrelation between Madame Freedom and American Hollywood films, the Girl Prince and Japan’s Takarazuka Revue, and the Après Girl and French existentialist philosophy.
Stories of Unification: Korean and German Perspectives on an Era of Change
Birgit Sussane Geipel, UC Riverside
In a nation divided for decades, the idea of unification becomes a utopian vision. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, marking the beginning of the post-Cold War era, the utopia of a unified nation has become a sobering reality in Germany, while it is still strong and regularly evoked in Korea, where the Sunshine Policy provided a temporary rapprochement. Today, Korea and Germany share a history of division, but not the reality of unification. After unification Eastern German Wende-literature creates a site of protest against the dominant historical discourse dictated by the West, as can be seen in Brigitte Burmeister’s post-Unification novel Unter dem Namen Norma (1994). In Korea, the changed political climate allows authors to engage with the national other. Kim Nam-ho’s novel Meeting (2001, DPRK) and Kim Young-ha’s novel Your Republic Is Calling You (2006, ROK) feature a protagonist of the respective other state, who become historiographers of a time twisted by ideological conflict. Each novel offers its individual version of an historical era of change. In this paper I analyze how the new historical situation has inspired authors to write about the experience of change and contact.
Minjung as an Unfinished Project: A Non-Teleological Reading of Shin Hak-chul’s History of Modern Korea Paintings
Kevin Michael Smith, UC Davis
This paper proffers an art historical interpretation of the 1980s-era South Korean Minjung movement’s articulation of utopian social transformation by examining the massive historical narrative paintings of Shin Hak-chul’s 1980-present “History of Modern Korea” series (hanguk gundaesa). While Minjung is commonly referred to as South Korean’s “pro-democracy” movement, positing the democratic reformations of the early 1990s as its final culmination, my reading of Shin’s historical paintings seeks to counter the prevailing understanding of Minjung’s teleological linearity, acknowledging instead a more diverse political imagination in what Namhee Lee terms the “counterpublic sphere” (undongkweon). The vertical accumulation of Walter Benjamin’s “rubble (Trümmer) of progress” in these muralistic paintings, I suggest, posits Korean history not as working toward some already concretely determinate end goal, but as an open-ended dialectic of atrocities and counteracting struggles. Shin’s dozens of adaptations of this same theme substantiates an anti-teleological reading of Minjung more generally, as the churning historical procession in each canvas differs in its protruding peak. This leads to bouts of hope in some, as in “Synthesis” (jonghap, 1982/83) with the intimate embrace of a hanbok clad couple at the swirling mass’ apotheosis, putatively signaling national reunification, but also a howling wolf’s head lamenting the Park Chung-hee coup d’état in “October 26th” (sip iryuk). Thus the end goal of modern Korean history and the corresponding Minjung movement is never absolute or final, but shifts with the specific timbre of each painting’s historical focus. Accordingly, I follow South Korean art critic Kim Jong-kil in thinking the Minjung movement proper and its post-1990s successors together in a continuous dialogue with ongoing concerns of the Korean public, not as historically discrete and incommensurate movements, so as address social antagonisms enduring after the much-welcomed democratic thaw of the 1990s.
Korean Literature as National and Global
Jonathan Glade, Michigan State University
Transitioning from a perspective that is internally focused and centered on the nation-state, the field of Korean literary studies is increasingly outward-looking and globally aware and has produced a great deal of new research from transnational and comparative perspectives, particularly that on the colonial period (1910–1945). As part of this transition, rigid constructions of “national literature” have recently been called into question, and new conceptions of what can be defined as “Korean” culture are being put forward and debated. Although I certainly locate my own work within this growing trend, I find that transnational research, particularly that pertaining to Korea, often becomes ensnared in the “comparative trap”—comparisons between nation-states and their “national” histories and cultures. How, then, can we think about Korean literature in a way that understands the ongoing significance of the “national” yet avoids the “comparative trap?” In an attempt to begin to answer this key question, I will examine three specific themes and how they speak to the current and future global context of Korean literature: (1) “national” literature as an object of study, (2) global circulations of cultural texts, and (3) literature’s place within a transforming cultural landscape.
