Science and Literature in Korea: An Introduction (original) (raw)
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Valuable Words :The power of the pen understanding Korea in their own words.
Valuable Words: The power of the pen. Understanding Korea in their own words. As the sound of KPOP echoes globally, Korean literature, from Buddhist prose to political satire has been quietly evolving into an international phenomenon. However, this was not always the case. Several factors have restricted the growth of Korean literature. Brother Anthony (C 5 4 8 C 1 2 0 C 7 A C) believe it is 'the world's lack of knowledge regarding Korea's recent history". Between 1910 to 1980 Korea experienced occupation, war and dictatorships. During this period literature was heavily censored and controlled stunting its growth. It is easy to forget with the glitz and glamour of Hallyu the history that lies behind modern Korea. Firstly, the occupation of Korea by the Japanese which placed an embargo on language and culture decimating a whole generation of Korean voices. Then later by successive Korean governments who understood the power of the pen in challenging political authority. In fact, the words "The pen is mightier than the sword" were first written by novelist and playwright Edward Bulwer-Lytton in 1839, in his historical play Cardinal Richelieu. During this time the pen did become mightier than the sword with poets such as Kim Chi Ha (A E 4 0 C 9 C 0 D 5 5 8) who called for democracy and challenged the government through poetry inspiring people to political action in oppressive circumstances. This period for Korean writers was a struggle as they had to write in a language (Korean) that had not been taught in schools and who had been overshadowed by the prestige of Japanese literature. Postwar was followed by the devastating Korean War and separation of North and South Korea. Censorship meant Korean writers could not openly express their intense longing for the return of their national identity. Writers then had to grapple with reflecting this trauma in their works and what their 'voice' would be and how that would constitute 'Korean style'. Many of the early writers adopted a focus on 'realism' reflecting the loss of innocence, hardship, corruption and acts of human love and kindness that offered hope in a harsh social reality of crushing poverty. Many of these works are now being translated to reflect Korea's unique experience of life in an almost 'rags to riches' story. Unlike many countries, it is a story of tragedy and loss to ultimate economic and cultural triumph. The significance of this experience when reflected in literature gives the reader a venue within which they can study the complexities and paradoxes that are an integral part of being human. It encourages the reader to question the world, opens them to the good, the potential, and the nature of humanity. It also opens them to the bad, the limitations and shortcomings of people, forming their opinions and understanding of the world. With increasing interest in Korean culture, translation of Korean works provides the rest of the world the chance to view it through the eyes and words of its own people. The relationship between the writer and the reader is intimate and pervasive. It allows for full immersion into a world that is often overshadowed by a veneer of projected success, beauty, convenience and technology. Korean literature offers insight beyond Hallyu into a world that can be equally as intoxicating, allowing the reader an intimacy only reserved for those who make it beyond the polite restraints of Korean society. Award winning novelist Shin Kyung-Sook(C 2 E 0
KIM SŬNG-OK'S LITERARY RESPONSE TO PAK CHŎNG-HŬI'S RE-MAKING OF KOREAN SOCIETY
Kim Sŭng-ok's early literature has been extensively talked about in regard to a number of themes including as a critique of western capitalism. However, there has been almost no analysis of how some of his early fiction can be read as a response to Pak Chŏng-hŭi's attempt to create a modern Korean mass identity through conservatizing and re-Confucianizing the nation by means of a powerful military-style mobilization project. After positing the existence of something called " a world of one's own " in a story titled " Saengmyŏng yŏnsŭp " (Practice for life, 1962) and incorporating a clearly Freudian super-ego vs. Id clash into the plot, Kim Sŭng-ok writes two more stories that can be read as having strong elements of resistance to Pak Chŏng-hŭi's totalizing project: " Yŏksa " (Strongman, 1963) and " Mujin kihaeng " (Record of a journey to Mujin, 1964). In these stories, his protagonists make efforts to resist the totalizing, subsuming effects of the homogenization and mobilization that appear in the texts and that can be traced to such efforts by the Pak regime. This article will analyze these stories for their attempts to resist the domination of a societal super-ego represented by Pak Chŏng-hŭi's patriarchal persona and mass mobilization efforts using state power. A psychoanalytic approach will be used to show how Kim attempted to create an individuated ego that could withstand (or escape) the tyranny of this societal super-ego.
Reading with Borders: Text, Context, and Comparative Literature from Korea
As an international faculty member at a liberal arts college in Seoul, teaching and "doing" comparative literature continues to unfold as a series of openended learning experiences. The most fundamental lesson, which seems both epistemological and ethical in nature, has been a pragmatic one: the importance of engaging the many institutional, pedagogic, and scholarly tensions arising in this emergent educational context. In the literature classroom, more specifically, this has taken the form of being attentive to the borders of text and context. Because most Korean students have been trained to read literature contextually, often in terms of preexisting national narratives, learning close literary reading can be a considerable challenge for them. Reading with borders enables students to register the epistemological frames that, heretofore, have limited, defined, and facilitated their knowledge. In crossing borders, we should strive to be as reflective and explicit as possible about what knowledge and relations these borders both preclude and enable. Such an awareness, gleaned in no small part from pedagogic practice, also informs my ongoing scholarly engagement with Korean modernism and the disciplinary tensions between area studies and comparative or world literature.
Journal of Korean Studies, 2017
Modern Korean newspapers played a decisive role in transforming the Korean fiction genre in the early twentieth century-a transformation that was carried out in two distinctively different cultural and political environments. In the 1900s, reformminded Korean intellectuals translated and authored fictional works in newspapers primarily as a way to instigate Koreans to participate in the nation-building process during the Patriotic Enlightenment movement (Aeguk kyemong undong) period. When Japan annexed Korea in 1910, the Daily News (Maeil sinbo) continually used fiction as a vehicle to deliver the colonial government's assimilation policy, that is, to raise Korea's socioeconomic and cultural status, with the aim of civilizing the society. The rhetoric of civilization is a common feature in fictional works produced during the period. However, what characterized the works serialized in Maeil sinbo was their increasing focus on individual desire and domestic affairs, which manifested itself in the form of courtship and familial conflicts. The confrontation between private desire and family relationships in these fictional works represented the prospect of higher education and economic equity while invoking emotional responses to the contradictory social reality of colonial assimilation in the portrayal of domestic issues in fiction. Looking at Maeil sinbo and its serialization of fiction not as a fixed totality of the Japanese imperial force but as a discursive space where contradicting views on civilization were formed, this paper scrutinizes emotional renderings of individuality and domesticity reflected in Maeil sinbo's serialized fiction in the early 1910s.
The Need to Reposition the Teaching of Contemporary Korean Literature
2012
K orean literature is generally taught in North American universities in an area studies department as one of the three major literary traditions of East Asia along with Japanese and Chinese literature. But far more than these better known national literatures, Korean literature functions as a means for heritage students and Korean studies majors to learn about the country in general. Meanwhile, the particular qualities of Korean literature that make it vital and worth studying for the way in which it, like other memorable works of literature, help us understand ourselves and the world around us—these qualities are too often lost. Instead, students are more likely to be concerned with what the story can teach them about being Korean or the culture rather than with what the literature itself has to offer. As an instructor of literature, I believe that this is where the problem lies. Usually, Korean literature is taught in isolation from literature programs throughout the rest of the ...
The Development of Mass Intellectuality: Reading Circles and Socialist Culture in 1920s Korea
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