Organizer: Kelly Y. Jeong, University of California, Riverside, USA Discussant: Kyeong-Hee Choi, University of Chicago, USA This panel explores Korean literature and film through the keyword “space” in its multivalent relationship to culture. The varying periods, media and perspectives are unified through the notion of space, which will lead to a larger, cohesive discourse about its significance. Heekyoung Cho’s paper investigates how newspaper serialization of translated novels opened up transcultural, interactive spaces for the translator and readers during the formative period of modern Korean literature, through analysis of a Korean translation of an English popular novel serialized in 1910s. Chris Hanscom’s paper discusses the representation of neurasthenia in modernist author Pak T'aewôn's 1930s fiction as a figure for the relationship between the individual and a society, made incoherent by the contradictions of the colonial-modern, and how the disease in turn reveals the “strange coevality” at the contact point between interiority and urban society. Kelly Jeong’s paper addresses the narrative turn in recent Korean cinema which no longer distinguishes the ‘evil’ urban space from the ‘good’ rural space, first through an analysis of the film characters’ socio-economic class and the notion of coevality in its relation to the ethical possibilities of different spaces, and secondly through an investigation of the process of Othering and identification in these films. Finally, Ji-Eun Lee’s paper describes the poetics of Ch'oe Yun's short stories, within the shifts in South Korean literature of the 1990s and beyond. She argues that the stories produce fractured space, a geography of tension, uncertainty, coalescence and rupture, as well as a creative possibility.
This paper investigates how newspaper serialization of translated novels opened up transcultural spaces and interactive spaces for the translator and readers during the formative period of modern Korean literature. I analyze the Korean translation of an English popular novel, Chŏngbuwŏn (A Virtuous Woman’s Resentment), serialized in Maeil Sinbo in 1914-15, showing how the serialization of the novel created a temporal coincidence in homogenous time through which the reader could imagine a community to which he or she belonged while also expanding the reach of the reader’s imagination to include foreign nations, both the boundaries and connections between them. In the middle of the serialization, the newspaper started publishing reader responses to the story. In these responses, readers not only expressed their emotional reactions and opinions about the novel’s development and its characters, but also remarked on the quality of translation even though they did not know the source text. Readers addressed both the translator and other readers, indicating that they were conscious of a virtual community of both readers and the translator. This community came together around the translation, but also reflected events and concerns connected to the readers’ actual lives. By examining the parallel display of a translated serial novel and reader responses, I will show how the newspaper engendered a space where fiction and a community of historically located readers developed over the duration of the serialization.
This paper discusses the representation of neurasthenia in modernist author Pak T'aewôn's 1930s fiction as a figure for the relationship between the individual and a society rendered seemingly incoherent by the contradictions of the colonial-modern. It first traces the early 20th century emergence in Korea of a popular discourse on neurasthenia, a precursor to Freud’s theories of hysteria and the neuroses. As initially conceived, this particularly urban disease already functioned in a contradictory fashion: as both a threatening sign of individual degeneracy amidst the everyday strain of life in the modern city, and as a mark of successful modernization. The discourse of neurasthenia thus provided an understanding of the psychology and biology of individual bodies at the intersection of the psychical and physical forces of modernity at the same time that it figured the health and cohesiveness of the political or social body. I trace two related movements away from this definition: the shift toward viewing neurasthenia as the sign of a specifically non-Western deficiency; and the shift from a logic of conservation to one of conversion in describing the relation between the psychical and somatic symptoms linked to the disease. I read this transition of neurasthenia from an external (social) to a psychical etiology in Pak's neurasthenic protagonists, in motion between the colonial capital of Kyôngsông and the imperial metropole of Tokyo, their symptoms revealing the “strange coevality” of a disease at the contact point between interiority and urban society.
Urban and rural spaces in Korean cinema have provided contrasting images that are associated with disparate ethical values and morality. Traditional film depictions of the city show it as a place of moral and physical danger, criminality, corruption, and ruin, and the countryside as a kind of utopian space of wholeness, goodness, and reintegration of the self and the community. This narrative tradition in Korean cinema goes at least as far back as “Angels on the Street,” a 1941 film by Ch’oe Ingyu. Such classical and binary division of urban and rural spaces in cinema, however, has disappeared in Korean films produced in the last two decades. It is replaced by depictions of the rural spaces as those of danger, perversity and moral corruption that cannot be distinguished from morally suspect urban spaces such as Seoul. My paper addresses this particular narrative turn in recent Korean cinema first through an analysis of the film characters’ socio-economic class and the notion of coevality in its relation to the ethical possibilities of different spaces, and secondly through an investigation of the process of Othering and identification in these films. To this end, the paper will examine recent films such as “Bloody Aria,” “Paradise Island,” “Welcome to Dongmakgol,” “Castaway on the Moon,” and “Moss” among others, focusing on the ways in which these films portray urban and rural spaces that have emotional and moral associations and resonances.
Using the analytic lens of "space", this paper explores Ch'oe Yun's short stories, and situates them within the shifts in South Korean literature of the 1990s and beyond. Ch'oe sets up various antinomies in her stories, including individual versus the masses, particular people versus the impersonal state, here versus there, domestic versus foreign, us versus them, then versus now, canonical historical event versus personal recollection, mapped space versus personal travels in place. These antinomies variously reinforce and cross-cut each other: they hint at distinctions and structures one moment then blur them the next, and thus offer no sure formula for being located in the world. What they produce, rather, is what I call fractured space, a geography of tension, uncertainty, coalescence and rupture, but also creative possibility, a space where events and people are simultaneously familiar and strange, and thus susceptible to re-vision and new illumination. This paper explores space on two fronts: first, by analyzing Ch'oe's use of space as a literary device in the texts; and second, by reading the stories against the backdrop of 1980s Korea, a turbulent moment where democratization since 1987 and the fall of the socialist bloc in 1989, fueled by immediate memories of harsh military regimes, led to the collapse of the realist mode in literature. The paper, in sum, attempts to describe the poetics of the 1990s as they inscribe Ch'oe's work.
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