The Korean Literature Series #5 – Jerome de Wit – ‘Writing during the Korean War, North and South’

This episode of the Korea Now podcast features an interview that Jed Lea-Henry conducted with Jerome de Wit. They speak about literature during the Korean War period, the writers that worked on both sides of the battlelines, the formation of war ideology, the institutionalisation of the process, the motivations for writing during the war, the issues and challenges involved in trying to find the appropriate message, the ability of this literature to capture emotions and rouse the reader to action, the nationalism and national identity that emerged/was built-up at this time, the dilemmas that concepts such as Minjok produced for considerations of post-war Korea, the way enemies and foreign powers were represented during the war, the gendered construction of womanhood, and important aspects of this literature and ideology that have maintained post-war and in some cases still continue today.

Jerome de Wit is a Junior Professor at the University of Tübingen, at the Institute of Asian and Oriental Studies in the Department of Korean Studies. Jerome de Wit received his Ph.D. from Leiden University, Netherlands. He is a Korean specialist on North and South Korean Wartime Literature and modern Korean culture. He is the author of articles that have appeared in the Memory Studies Journal and in several Korean journals. He has been a Research Fellow at both the Asiatic Research Institute (Korea University, 2012) as well as the Kyujanggak (Seoul National University, 2014). He is also co-organizer of the Korean Studies Graduate Students Convention in Europe. His research interest in Korean culture is focused on public discourses concerning history and society and how cultural sources can provide us with different viewpoints on debates such as nationalism, identity, and history.

*** Jerome de Wit’s dissertation: ‘Writing under wartime conditions: North and South Korean writers during the Korean War (1950-1953)’ (https://openaccess.leidenuniv.nl/bitstream/handle/1887/31445/Writing%20under%20Wartime%20Conditions%20Jerome%20de%20WitNIEUW.pdf?sequence=3).

*** Jerome de Wit’s forthcoming book: ‘Literature and Cultural Identity during the Korean War: Comparing North and South Korean Writing’ (https://www.bookdepository.com/Literature-Cultural-Identity-during-Korean-War-Mr-Jerome-de-Wit/9781350106529).

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The Korean Literature Series #4 – Janet Poole – ‘Literature in Late Colonial Korea’

This episode of the Korea Now podcast features an interview that Jed Lea-Henry conducted with Janet Poole. They speak about Korean literature in the late-colonial period, the unique group of writers that emerged at this time, how they dealt with both censorship and the feeling of inevitability about Japanese rule, what the stories of this period looked like and the themes that tended to emerge, the depictions of the future and the everyday, the place of modernity and nostalgia, what Korean identity looked like and how it was developed through literature, the impact that this period had on Korean nationalism and Korean literature, and a deep look at specific late-colonial writers and their work.

Janet Poole is an Associate Professor and Distinguished Professor of the Humanities in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Toronto. Her research and teaching interests lie in aesthetics in the broad context of colonialism and modernity, in history and theories of translation, and in the creative practice of literary translation. Janet’s book, When the Future Disappears: The Modernist Imagination in Late Colonial Korea, writes the creative works of Korea’s writers into the history of global modernism, and colonialism into the history of fascism, through an exploration of the writings of poets, essay writers, fiction writers and philosophers from the final years of the Japanese empire. It won the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize (2015) and Honorable Mention for the Association of Asian Studies James B. Palais Prize (2016).

Janet is also a translator of the mid-century writer Yi T’aejun and has published a collection of his best short fiction from 1925 through 1950, by which time he had moved to North Korea (Dust and Other Stories, Columbia University Press); and a collection of his anecdotal essays originally published during the Asia-Pacific War (Eastern Sentiments, Columbia University Press, paperback edition, 2013), which offers a quirky take on everyday life in 1930s Korea: wistful, nostalgic and violently colonial.

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The Korean Literature Series #3 – Ross King – ‘Korean-to-English Literary Translation - A Critical Examination’

This episode of the Korea Now podcast features an interview that Jed Lea-Henry conducted with Ross King. They speak about the landscape of Korean-to-English literary translation, the rise in interest over the past few years and support for the practice, how such translation can be taught and the challenges that exist within the field, the organisations that support and fund this translation, the bureaucratic and underlying assumptions behind this funding and support, the misplaced resistance against people studying Korean literature outside of Korea as well as the bias towards outbound translation, the structures and attitudes that are holding back the achievement of wider spread and more impressive Korean-to-English literary translation, and importantly Ross’s personal experiences working and teaching within this area of study.

Ross King is a Professor of Korean language and literature at the University of British Columbia, as well as the Head of the Department of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia. He completed his B.A. in Linguistics at Yale and his doctorate in Linguistics (Korean) at Harvard. Ross taught Korean language and linguistics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, from 1990 to 1994, before accepting his current position. Ross's research interests range from Korean historical grammar, dialectology and pedagogy to the language, culture and history of the ethnic Korean minority in the former Soviet Union. He also serves as Dean of the Korean Language Village at Concordia Language Villages, a Korean language and culture summer immersion program for young people ages 7 to 18 that is based in northern Minnesota. Pertinent to this podcast, Ross is the author of ‘Infected Korean Language, Purity Verses Hybridity’ (https://www.academia.edu/37363111/INFECTED_KOREAN_LANGUAGE_PURITY_VERSUS_HYBRIDITY), and ‘Can Korean-to-English Literary Translation be Taught? Some Recommendations for Korean Funding Agencies’ (https://www.academia.edu/3358674/Can_Korean-to-English_literary_translation_be_taught_Some_recommendations_for_Korean_funding_agencies).

*** Ross King’s academic publications can be found at: https://ubc.academia.edu/RossKing

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The Korean Literature Series #2 – Ayse Naz Bulamur – ‘Love as a Contact Zone - Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee’

This episode of the Korea Now podcast features an interview that Jed Lea-Henry conducted with Ayse Naz Bulamur. They speak about Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee, the different analytical interpretations of the novel, the importance of the text and how people have come to understand it over time, the role that emotion plays in building the characters, the blend between prose, poetry, autobiography, historical text, and story-telling, the experimental nature of the novel, the way that time plays out – both connecting and separating characters, the distance that emerges between the Korean mother and her Korean-American daughter, and importantly how love becomes a ‘contact zone’ for the female characters across time and space.

Ayse Naz Bulamur is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Western Languages and Literatures at Boaziçi University, Istanbul. She received her PhD in Literary Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is the author of How Istanbul's Cultural Complexities Have Shaped Eight Contemporary Novelists: Tales of Istanbul in Contemporary Fiction, and Victorian Murderesses: The Politics of Female Violence. She has written articles on the works of British, American, and Turkish female writers from the early seventeenth century to the present, including articles on Margaret Fuller's Woman in the Nineteenth Century, Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette, Elizabeth Cary's The Tragedy of Mariam, A. S. Byatt's The Djinn in the Nightingales Eye, and Elif Safak's The Bastard of Istanbul. Her research focuses on postcolonial theory, urban theory, feminist criticism, and nineteenth-century and contemporary fiction. And pertinent to this podcast she is the author of: ‘Love as a Contact Zone in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee (1982)’ (https://sjeas.skku.edu/upload/201410/4.%20Ayse%20Naz%20BULAMUR%20for%20homepage.pdf).

*** Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee (https://www.amazon.com/Dictee-Theresa-Hak-Kyung-Cha/dp/0520261291).

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The Korean Literature Series #1 – Minsoo Kang – ‘The Story of Hong Gildong’

This episode of the Korea Now podcast features an interview that Jed Lea-Henry conducted with Minsoo Kang. They speak about The Story of Hong Gildong, the importance of this story in both Korean history and continuing into the present day, the origins of the Hong Gildong character in the Joseon Dynasty, the understanding of this character as a ‘noble robber’ in the same archetype as Robin Hood, the historical myths and scholarly inaccuracies that have changed most peoples’ conceptions of the text, the difficulty in translating the story from the 34 extant versions that survive today, the pseudo-history that has built up around both the story and the figure of Hong Gildong, how we should view the story now and its place in modern Korean society, and why The Story of Hong Gildong remains such an important achievement in Korean literature.

Minsoo Kang is an associate professor in European history, with specialities in the cultural and intellectual history of France, England, and Germany in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries at the University of Missouri–St. Louis. He received his Ph.D. in June of 2004 from the University of California, Los Angeles, where he wrote his dissertation on the automaton as a cultural and intellectual symbol in the European imagination. In addition to articles in numerous journals he is the author of ‘Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination’ (Harvard University Press, 2010) and co-editor of ‘Visions of the Industrial Age, 1830 - 1914: Modernity and the Anxiety of Representation in Europe’. And pertinent to this podcast, he is also the author of ‘The Story of Hong Gildong’ (Penguin Classics) (https://www.bookdepository.com/Story-Hong-Gildong-Minsoo-Kang/9780143107699?ref=grid-view&qid=1592728297640&sr=1-1), and ‘Invincible and Righteous Outlaw: The Korean Hero Hong Gildong in Literature, History, and Culture’ (https://www.bookdepository.com/Invincible-Righteous-Outlaw-Minsoo-Kang/9780824884314?ref=grid-view&qid=1592728324023&sr=1-5).

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