Ports of Call: A Maritime Study of Korean Modernist Poetry

Acta Koreana, 2015

Journal of Korean Studies , 2023

This article examines the colonial-era poet and critic Im Hwa's (林和 1908-1953) maritime literary trope of Hyŏnhaet'an (玄海灘), the strait separating the Korean peninsula from the Japanese archipelago, as it encompasses Korea's contradictory peripheral location within the Japanese empire. Im Hwa's repeated invocations of this body of water served as a channel for navigating the escalating pressures of colonial censorship, in which the romanticized, masculinist figure of the valiant "youth" (ch'ŏngnyŏn) substituted for the former working-class protagonist from Im's esteemed "short narrative poems" (tanp'yŏn sŏsasi) during the heyday of the proletarian literary movement. Further, Im's fixation on the vicissitudes of the seafaring journey across the strait can be said to articulate the precarious position occupied by Korean colonial subjects of the Japanese emperor, neither permitted full assimilation nor capable of enduring perpetual subjugation as second-class citizens. The article concludes by exploring how the liminality of passage across Hyŏnhaet'an exemplifies both the tensions between nationalism and social class in the revised geopolitical

Modernism/modernity, 2020

https://modernismmodernity.org/articles/smith-shuddering-century This article examines the reception of European futurism in colonial Korea in the early-to- mid-1930s through the writings of Kim Ki-rim and O Chang-hwan, both of whom composed long modernist poems over the course of 1934 engaging with modern warfare and global imperialism—Kim’s “Weather Map” (Kisangdo, p. 1935) and O’s “War” (Chŏnjaeng, 1934, unpublished). My central proposition, based on close readings of these two poems in comparison with works by Italian and Japanese futurists, is that Korea’s unevenly developed colonial location and its experience with the violence of military occupation and with escalating warfare in China indirectly discouraged the celebratory posture adopted by the European futurists towards technology, speed, and mechanized violence.

Journal of Asian Studies, 2018

Yi Kwangsu’s The Heartless (Mujŏng, 1917) is Korea’s first mature novel and its most celebrated text, on par with Natsume Soseki’s Kokoro (1914) and Lu Xun’s The True Story of Ah Q (1922). Its place in world literary studies, however, has often been obscured by the author’s later collaboration with the colonial state. This article attempts a new, spatialized reading of the much-studied work to reconsider alterity (Japan-Korea, city-hometown) as a precondition of modernity itself. The ancient seat of the Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1910), Seoul in the 1910s was swiftly transforming into the minjok national capital and, simultaneously, a colonial city-within-empire. Competing identities of nation-versus-empire dominated its surfaces, veiling the processes of “coming up” (sanggyŏng 上京) to the capital from forgotten localities, as many writers associated with Seoul were actually from provinces with regional affinities. The Heartless—a paean to the enlightenment and to the Korean minjok—surprisingly reflects this dynamic, testifying to the “loss of hometown” by northwestern (Sŏbugin 西北人) writers like Yi Kwangsu, who regularly code-switched to their local dialects, as well as to the Japanese language.

Abstract; My essay examines the modern Korean painter Lee Quede within the colonial context of Korea from 1910 until 1945, when the country was subject to Japanese economic, political, and military power and the machinations of its Empire building. In my examination of Lee’s work and the social context in which they were created, this essays discusses the critical terms such as “return to the soil” or “return to the land.” The terms imply a sentimental but politicized use of the landscape in order to evoke the tranquility and traditional customs and scenery of the countryside in colonial Korea. The same spirit is found in the aesthetics of Yanagi Muneyoshi (1889-1961), who fetishized and exoticized the “Orientalism” in his theory known as Mingei. The essay will focus on interpreting a body of work produced by Lee in terms of “the return to the land” and will incorporate frequent comparisons with other works of art in Korea and Japan to elucidate a clearer and more distinct historical frame of reference. While looking at the formation and complicated development of nationalism in Japan and Korea in the beginning of the twentieth century, Chung wants to open a more fundamental question about how the Korean artist Lee and Japanese theorist Yanagi responded to the clash of indigenous traditionalism and Western modernity in the colonial context, and how each relied on the concept of the “return to the land” as a directive to either politicize (Lee) or depoliticize (Yanagi) the function of art. This conflicting situation will also address how vernacular modernity in the history of Modernism in Korea. Conference Info: Picturing Identities and Ideologies in Modern Korea: Transnational Perspectives for Visual Culture Hosting Institution: Center for Korean Studies, Institute of East Asian Studies, UC Berkeley Funding: Academy of Korean Studies Dates: March 14–15, 2019 Place: Banatao Institute in Sutardja Dai Hall, University of California, Berkeley Room 310 (main); Room 310 & 250 (breakout sessions)

Asian Studies Review, 2022