Organizer: Daniel H. Kim, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Chair and Discussant: Seungsook Moon, Vassar College

This panel examines the range of cultural reactions to the tremendous political and economic changes in South Korea associated with Park Chung Hee’s drive for national autonomy via economic development. While the successes and tribulations of Park’s authoritarianism and industrialization strategies have been well documented, the effects of these processes on cultural production have been curiously understudied. In one of the very few such studies on the tensions between culture and politics, Kim U-ch’ang has noted an acute "agony of cultural construction," where certain works of literature became handmaidens to larger ideological struggles. Affirming Kim’s insight, this panel seeks to further explore a variety of cultural responses, including opposing cases where culture served as the agent rather than the tool of socio-cultural conflict and change.

Jin-kyung Lee analyzes the ways in which Hwang Sok-yong’s works on South Korean participation in the Vietnam War contest constructions of masculinity and ethnonationalism. Youngju Ryu’s paper analyzes the emergence of an ethics of the neighbor, a logic that remains intransigently external to forms of belonging based on identity politics, in the agrarian fiction of Yi Mun-gu. Hyung-ki Shin re-considers the relations between politics and morality in Hwang Sok-yong’s representations of the people (minjung) and mythologized heroic figures. And Daniel Kim’s paper examines the way prominent works of cultural production (as opposed to critically acclaimed works) in the 1970s resisted politically polarizing tendencies by focusing more on entertainment than on intellectual engagement.

Jin Kyung Lee, University of California, San Diego

Between 1965 and 1973, the Park Chung Hee regime dispatched over 300, 000 troops to Vietnam. After the withdrawal, the Vietnam War receded in the South Korean collective memory until the early 1990s when reports on South Korean civilian massacres brought the war back into South Korean consciousness and into public debates. South Korea’s economic entry into Vietnam became another opportunity to remember the war. Keeping these historical changes in mind, this paper examines literary representations of the Vietnam War by Hwang Sok-yong and An Chong-hyo from the 1970s and the early 1980s. I focus on the appropriation of militarized working-class masculine sexuality for the authoritarian state’s bid for development and advancement in the global capitalism. My paper further analyzes the ways in which construction of South Korean national identity of the Vietnam War period and beyond was closely bound up with militarized masculine bodies’ sexual-ized relations with Korean and Vietnamese women and with men of other races, including Vietnamese, African-American, and white American in the multi-racial context of the Vietnam War. I conclude the paper with a consideration of recent literary works, which explore the (dis-)connections between remembrance of the war and search for possible reconciliation and reparation on the one hand, and the current South Korean economic and cultural "interests" in Vietnam on the other. Situating South Korea’s historical relation with Vietnam in the military-economic contexts of the post-1945 US-dominated Asia, the paper locates South Korea’s altered status from neo-colonized to sub-imperial nation both in its earlier and recent advances into Vietnam.

Youngju Ryu, University of California, Los Angeles

A crucial category in post-Kantian ethical thought in the West, neighbor is a figure that remains intransigently external to forms of belonging based on identity. Neither friend nor foe, neither kin nor stranger, but an eternal other whom one is commanded to love as oneself, neighbor opens up a mode of sociality beyond the individual and the collective. Drawing on this logic of the neighbor, the paper examines the works of the South Korean fiction writer Yi Mungu from the 1970s. A decade of rapid industrialization, the 1970s was a period of growing collective consciousness in Korean literary discourse, and Yi Mungu’s works from this period have been read largely as consolidating the category of agrarian poor as one of the major collective identities produced in the wake of the Park Chung Hee regime’s economic policies and made available for deployment in the subsequent era of political dissidence. I argue, however, that the sustained interest in his neighbors which formed the ethical core of Yi Mungu’s literary project was less a way of generating a collective identity as such than a means of resisting forms of thought based on politics of identity altogether. Yi Mungu’s insistence on the absolute localness of fiction, reflected not only in the subject matter of his writing but in the oral tradition upon which he drew for formal and technical innovations, represents an inherently anti-ideological form of storytelling at a time when ideology was fast becoming the dominant vehicle for any articulation of social truth.

Hyung-ki Shin, Yonsei University, Republic of Korea

This paper analyzes Hwang Sok-yong’s historical roman-fleuve, Changgil-San, praised as the "best historical novel" that South Korea has produced, as a narrative of nation (minjok) and of the people (minjung). The novel describes a familiar process of maturation of a "lowly" hero through which he overcomes the pain of loss and suffering and reaches a heightened enlightenment. The people’s hero further gains honor and distinction by struggling against injustices. The hero, able to live up to the people’s expectations, speaks for their desperate hopes and in return he demands their submission to him. The novel also requires the reader to imagine becoming one with the hero through his/her identification with the people. In the world of unambiguous opposition between good and evil, the heroic figure’s ultimate victories transform the narrative of people into a mythology. Hwang’s novel was received as a resistive and progressive text at the historical juncture when South Koreans were calling for democratization and liberation from decades of military dictatorships. However, the novel in fact represents the people as an amorphous imaginary subject, while portraying the ethical subject, the people’s hero, as an anonymous symbol. It is, I argue in this paper, this mythologization of the narrative of the people that enables the operation of a politics of morality. My reading of Changgil-San explores the ways in which this type of politics of morality limits our consideration of ethics as well as resistive and progressive politics.

Daniel H. Kim, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

The Yusin Constitution—the October 1972 "coup in office" staged by President Park Chung Hee—inaugurated a new cultural dynamic between state and society, where cultural production was caught between the agonizing push and pull of authoritarianism and industrialization. Although Park was brutally intolerant of radical opposition, an examination of cultural production at the moderate center reveals a surprising symbiosis, where a newly-forming middle class was too busy urbanizing and consuming to lament any lack of political freedom. Cultural production moved away from ideology and toward entertainment, such that the 1970s is actually less like the colonial era "military rule" (budan seiji) and more like the post-1919 "cultural rule" (bunka seiji). Literary critics scorned anything noncommittal as "escapist," but their disapproval did nothing to deter the rise of popular fiction, film, and music. In the 1970s, consumerism was actually a positive measure of both national autonomy and across-the-board increases in quality of life. To examine this new dynamic, I focus on the disconnect between the mass popularity of novelist and screenplay writer Kim Sung-ok and his tepid critical reception in the 1970s. I argue that Kim was responding to cultural realities without regard for critical ideals, and that the re-examination of his literary strategy reveals how engagement-school criticism has (dis)colored our understanding of literary history. Kim’s paradoxical position serves as an apt metaphor of the two competing master narratives of cultural production in the 1970s, and suggests that the study of Korean literary history is faced with its own "disquiet."