Routledge Handbook of Modern Korean Literature

Abstract

In the Routledge Handbook of Modern Korean Literature, the editor Yoon Sun Yang has brought together twenty-one contributors to provide an overview of some of the most relevant issues in contemporary Korean literary studies. In offering a broad introduction to modern Korean literature, the book may be compared to earlier English-language anthologies, but it diverges sharply from these prior publications in its approach to the subject. Instead of offering a survey of representative works, the book makes visible the multiple, sometimes intersecting and sometimes competing, practices that make up what is called modern Korean literature. It sheds light on the interpretive frameworks that have long prescribed which texts constitute “modern Korean literature” and how they should be read. Moreover, it showcases the various ways these earlier frameworks are currently being challenged.The book provides broad historical coverage—the texts discussed range from the writings of Korean Confucian literati in the 1900s to contemporary South Korean novels from the last decade—but it consciously eschews the usual chronological organization. In addition to several contributed chapters explicitly questioning the traditional periodization of modern Korean history (most notably the 1945 divide), Yang has opted to organize the book under five analytical themes rather than along a linear chronology.The book opens with “Part 1: The Power of Literature/Literature of Power,” which analyzes Korean literature’s engagement with politics across the long twentieth century. Special emphasis is placed on reexamining what political engagement might look like and shedding light on instances where such engagements do not neatly map onto the politics of institutions or nation-states. In a chapter about the proletarian literature movement in the colonial period, Kimberly Chung argues that the movement should be recognized for its diffuse yet significant efforts to radically democratize artistic representation rather than in terms of its (in)ability to maintain power or achieve specific institutional goals. In another chapter about the colonial period, Travis Workman finds that literary representations of the Kando region in Manchuria disrupt the assumed antagonism between Korean nationalism and Japanese imperialism by exposing the brutality of capitalist extraction conducted under the narratives of modernization and development. For her part, Sunyoung Park demonstrates how Korean science fiction has provided critical interrogations into imperial constructions of racial and ethnic hierarchies, despite the fact that the birth of science fiction in the world was intimately connected to the project of empire building. Other chapters in part 1 reassess the traditional divide in Korean literary history between pure and engaged literature. Jin-kyung Lee persuasively argues that writer Kim Tongin’s claim of art for art’s sake was in fact an effort to address and overcome colonial limitations rather than a withdrawing from political reality. Youngju Ryu’s chapter on the literary representations of state torture complicates the binary of engaged versus pure art in yet another way, by teasing out the divergences within “engaged literature” and analyzing the subtle yet important shifts in aesthetic responses to the legacies of authoritarianism.“Part 2: Crossing Borders, Redrawing Boundaries” challenges the assumed bordering of Korean literature. One way to do this is by drawing attention to the existence of forgotten differences and unevenness within the contours of the nation, as Ellie Choi does by examining the development of a distinct P’yŏngyang-centered literature in the colonial period. Another way is to throw light on the acts of border crossing and their contextual significances. Ji Young Kim and Jonathan Glade both set their chapters in the immediate post-Liberation period to examine movements that flouted the geopolitical boundaries that would become cemented in the later Cold War years: Kim traces literary representations of movement across the 38th Parallel, while Glade excavates forgotten exchanges between Korean writers in Japan and southern Korean writers. Immanuel Kim also examines exchanges across the 38th Parallel but jumps several decades later in history to the 1980s and 1990s South Korean student groups who circulated North Korean literature against the South Korean national security law. Janet Poole demonstrates how the modernist Ch’oe Myŏngik’s continuing critique of imperial time across the 1945 divide shatters the hermeneutical boundaries we tend to place on North Korean literature. We Jung Yi examines works by Ch’oe Inhun and Pak Wansŏ, two giants in the South Korean literary canon, to show how they defied the official historiography of the Cold War authoritarian regimes by depicting kyŏnggyein, or figures defined by their lack of territorial belonging.“Part 3: Rationality in Korean Literature and Its Limits: Scientists, Detectives, and Doctors” examines how scientific thinking intersected with modern Korean literature, as well as how the supposedly universal discourses on science and rationality were adapted into local contexts. Jongyon Hwang traces creative adaptations of Western scientific discourse and the theory of evolution in particular by Korean Confucian literati in the first decades of the twentieth century, while Jooyeon Rhee looks at the development of detective fiction in colonial Korea. Karen Thornber analyzes Pak Wansŏ’s short story about a woman gynecologist as part of the emerging field of medical humanities and explores how narratives about medical care may be altered in translations.“Part 4: Transnational Archives: Language, Ethnicity, and Translation” confronts the ethnolinguistic assumptions of Korean literature by turning to literary translators and diasporic writers. Nayoung Aimee Kwon discusses how the role of translator is central to the writer Kim Saryang’s legacy, as well as the reason he remained marginalized in postcolonial accounting of national literatures. Cindi Textor focuses on Zainichi literature, or literature by the Korean diaspora in Japan, to argue how its primary significance lies in being a thorny reminder of modern Korean literature’s origins and its complex relationship to colonialism. Yoon Sun Yang introduces unpublished works by the little-known Korean American writer Nak Chung Thun from the early twentieth century and discusses avenues for future research that such newly discovered transpacific archives can open up. Kelly Jeong provides a reading of the well-known Asian American writer Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s novel Dictee as a transgressive autobiography marked by shifting subjectivities.The last section, “Part 5: Korean Literature in the Changing Mediascape: Radio, Television, and Print Culture,” includes chapters that offer fresh considerations of Korean literature through the lens of intermediality. Jina Kim explores “radio novels” in the late colonial period and demonstrates how literature’s mediation by radio led to amplification of its political power but also fragmentation of its meaning. Evelyn Shih, in her examination of literary representations of television and television viewership from the 1970s, finds that while the Yusin authoritarian state sought to use the emerging popular medium to control its citizenry, the social reordering facilitated by television could be multidirectional and even liberating for the individual subjects. A mook, or magazine-book hybrid, is the medium examined in Susan Hwang’s chapter, which brings to light how leftist movements in South Korea in the 1980s strategically used this publication format to bring together aesthetic and socioeconomic matters in service of radical labor politics.In addition to these five organizing themes, this collection has several other recurring topics and themes. One is the dominance of social Darwinism in the early modern Korean consciousness. All three chapters concerning the early decades of the twentieth century—Jin-kyung Lee’s on the aesthetic theories of Kim Tongin, Jongyon Hwang’s on the Korean adaptation of Western scientific discourse, and Yoon Sun Yang’s on the overlooked instances of early Korean American literature—reveal how Korean intellectuals and writers in diverse positions grappled with the theory of social Darwinism, acknowledging and even embracing it as a powerful form of modern knowledge while struggling with its justification of imperialism and other existing unequal power relations.Another recurring theme is the marginalization of popular literatures from national literature. In their respective chapters on science fiction, detective fiction, and radio novels, Sunyoung Park, Jooyeon Rhee, and Jina Kim demonstrate how, contrary to characterization of popular culture as either mere escapist diversions or tools of dominant authorities, genre fictions could open up spaces of critical and even subversive reflection. Evelyn Shih’s reading of what she terms “television fiction” contributes to this argument by revealing how mass culture, instead of simply functioning as a handmaiden for the surveillance state, could rearrange social relations in ways that were highly ambivalent and even transgressive against the state authorities.Another theme that threads throughout the book is the positioning of Korean literature as part of world literature. Many chapters also explicitly address and seek to decenter the Eurocentrism implicit within the notion of world literature. The above-mentioned chapters on genre literatures demonstrate how colonial or postcolonial adaptations of, say, science fiction and detective fiction subversively return the gaze of the Western(ized) empire or destabilize the meaning of modernity with what Jooyeon Rhee terms their “polysemic potential.” And Karen Thornber situates her reading of Pak Wansŏ as part of a broader effort to address the notable absence of the non-West in the emerging scholarship on literature and medicine. Ji Young Kim, in her chapter on the literary representations of movements across the 38th Parallel, positions her analysis as part of a broad paradigmatic shift occurring in Cold War studies from a US-centered approach to a more global, comparative one. Moreover, Janet Poole and Jongyon Hwang propose innovative approaches for thinking about modern Korean literature in relation to global modernism, with Poole introducing the notion of “midcentury modernism” as a way to conceptualize the continuity between the colonial and the postcolonial more generally, and Hwang suggesting the dialectical movement between aesthetics and science as a new framework for future literary and cultural studies of Korea and around the world.Finally, a number of chapters emphasize the importance of gender in various modes of transnationality. Travis Workman reads Kang Kyŏng’ae as a writer whose texts about the female subaltern depicted the brutal process of capitalist dispossession on the frontier as a socioeconomic issue of class and gender rather than as an allegory for the nation. In Kelly Jeong’s chapter, feminism is key to how Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s novel transgresses the politics of national identification. And Yoon Sun Yang explores how miscegenation, in its literal and figurative meanings, is central to Nak Chung Thun’s body of work. Thun’s fictions of interracial romance and marriage serve as fascinating examples of transnational literature that effectively inhabited heterogeneous linguistic communities and appropriated narrative forms from both sides of the Pacific.As Yang makes clear in her editor’s introduction, the book is designed to spur further inquiries on the studies of modern Korean literature rather than to serve as an exhaustive or definitive guide on the subject. Indeed, one of the volume’s major contributions is in suggesting avenues for future research. A number of the chapters provide helpful overviews of growing subfields in Korean literary studies, such as science fiction (Sunyoung Park) and North Korean literature (Immanuel Kim), complete with explanations on their current limitations and potential for future research. The chapters on translation and diaspora literature demonstrate how productive the lens of transnationality has been for cutting-edge, innovative research on modern Korean literature but also reveals how much more remains to be done, including work that excavates linkages beyond those with the United States and Japan. The book also introduces nascent topics for research, such as rationality in Korean literature, that await further explorations. Overall, the Routledge Handbook of Modern Korean Literature provides important catalysts for new research while also offering an accessible overview of a wide range of topics and approaches taken in contemporary Korean studies. In doing so, the book clearly positions itself to become an indispensable guide to anyone interested in the study of Korean literature and culture.