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Session 73: INDIVIDUAL PAPERS: Literature, Art, and Society

Ann Choi, University of California, Los Angeles

In the 1920s, questions surrounding what was good and what was beautiful were linked together by the idea of a collective essence known as Korean "spirit" (hon) or "mind" (sim). It was a time when the rhetoric and practice of folk poetry came close to forming the experience of a ‘period’ during which one could trace the rise, development, and decline of a literary form. While Kim Sowol’s self-conscious poetics based on folk songs fulfilled the call for sound, rhythm, and feeling deemed aesthetically satisfying, his practice was more variegated. The poet’s own belief in the value of poetry as expression of the hidden aspects of an organic whole made up the larger frame within which he experimented with poetry that went beyond the boundaries of oral, transmissive works based on repetition and parallelism. While the simplicity of his well-known works evoking a sense of ‘home’ through the use of these mnemonic and stock features attributed to the appeal of his poetry, the emphasis he placed on the individual spirit of the artist embodied the paradox of a literary trend called romanticism under which folk poetry falls: the adherence to a faith in the tradition and the collective concomitant with the concern for individual expression. What can be called his romantic-symbolist tendencies led Kim Sowol to the privileging of longing, the extensive use of pathetic fallacy, and to the thematic focus on night and dreams to express a subjectivity approaching the illumination of a ‘soul.’

Michael J. Pettid, Academy of Korean Studies

This paper examines the Pari kongju muga (Song of the Abandoned Princess), a narrative shaman’s song retelling the deification process of the matriach of Korean shamanism, Princess Pari. This song continues to be performed in shamanistic ceremonies as an essential element of eschatological rituals. Although there are regional variations of this song, I concentrate on the Seoul-Kyônggi version of Pari kongju and the social values and criticisms contained in the narrative. My analysis enables an understanding of the social ethics most important to late-Chosôn-period females—the primary adherents and celebrants of shamanism. Among the prominent values in Pari kongju is a strong critique of the dominant Neo-Confucian ideology, especially the misogynic practices surrounding male-child preference. The narrative also dismisses the low social position ascribed to women and the restrictive societal structure that limited their activities to roles such as daughter, wife, or mother. Consequently, this textual examination enables insight into female aspirations in the late Chosôn period. Furthermore, Pari kongju is significant in its capacity as a metaphor and paradigm for the celebrants of shamanism—the mostly female shamans of Korea, known as mudang. This narrative reflects the hardships and social ostracization that mudang were traditionally confronted with by official society. Hence, a meaningful function of Pari kongju is to establish a model for the mudang.

James P. Thomas, Harvard University

A ubiquitous, bold new medium during the colonial period, print advertisements are a significant source of the colonial imagery of race, class, gender, romance, urbanity, modernity, internationalism, etc. Yet these ads have long been overlooked by scholars in favor of literary fiction, news copy, government documents, and other grammatical texts. This sampling of print advertisements drawn from Korean newspapers and journals from the turn of the last century to the end of the colonial occupation provides a lens into consumer culture and emergent social standards, reflecting many new developments in early 20th-century Korean cultural life. Because these ads were politically neutral or less ideologically loaded—relative to the dominant media of the day—they had a power to convey new cultural ideals and contribute to cultural assimilation, through consumer practice—in ways that official policies could not. And yet, ad messages were not always consistent with the aims of colonial cultural policies.

This research is part of a larger project that seeks to periodize the fashions of visual imagery in Korean advertising from its earliest beginnings to the present.