Organizer: John Frankl, Yonsei University

Chair: Hyung Gu Lynn, University of British Columbia

Discussants: Hyung Gu Lynn, University of British Columbia, Jiwon Shin, University of California, Berkeley

A careful examination of the interplay between city and text is crucial to an understanding of early twentieth-century Korean literature. Seoul, in particular, served in multiple capacities as the center of a preexisting Korea and the hub of a growing Japanese empire, primary site for the reception and adaptation of modern ideas and technologies, and the locus in and from which a redefinition of identities along transnational lines occurred.

All of the elements above appear in works of prose fiction. These are most often marked by a palpable ambivalence and hybridity, both of which problematize simplistic dichotomies of colonial oppressor versus colonized oppressed. Works from the period simultaneously depict physical and philosophical meanderings between Seoul and the Korean countryside, and between Seoul and the outposts of the Japanese empire. Embedded within these narratives lies an oscillation between the desire for technology, advancement, reconstruction, and superior place in empire, and the nostalgia for a pre-colonial, rural, untrammeled, virgin, and isolated Korea. Both sets of wanderings are mediated by the train and automobile, and later even the airplane, either from Seoul to the provinces, or to the farthest reaches of empire such as Harbin in the north and Java in the south. The papers in this panel each outline various ways in which, using Seoul as nexus, people navigated between these fluctuating geographical and intellectual poles.

Chul Kim, Yonsei University

Yi Gi-Yeong's novels such as Gohyang (Homeland), Singaeji (Newly-Developed Land) and Cheonyeoji (Virgin Territory) are stories of heroes/heroines who wander in a continuous search for times of lost potential, i.e. they are expressions of modern nostalgia. By reading these novels as stories of modern nostalgia, I attempt to reveal that Korean modern realism, as generally represented by proletarian novels, being based on the altered view of time—the ideology of linear progress in particular—that accompanies modernity, in fact contains an attempt to break free from the ontological restraints of reality.

The space-time of the rural villages in Yi’s novels possesses ambilaterality. These are pure, archetypal, and unspoiled spaces. In these spaces, time equals "the past," and the characters represent members of a proletariat filled with simple-minded vitality. Simultaneously, and contrarily, these spaces are something that should be reconstructed and transformed. Thus, time in these spaces equals "the future," and the characters represent barbarians in the darkness of ignorance, and, as such, objects that should also be transformed.

Modern nostalgia is a simultaneous longing for revolution (future) and tradition (past), and, in that sense, modernity itself. The so-called "homeland" and "rural community" discovered by the gaze of intellectuals-heroes-authors possessed by such modern nostalgia are merely other colonies within the colony, and the proletariat residing therein is nothing more than an existence re-colonized by those urban intellectuals. Thus, this nostalgia for the future could be labeled a "colonial nostalgia."

Kyoung-Hoon Lee, Yonsei University

Modern Korean literature was largely constructed by and about a newly-urbanized youth who maintained an ambivalent relationship with science and technology. Young fictional protagonists ventured from their cities only to be confronted by what they often referred to as the "violence of nature." But such phrasing actually represented the rhetoric of modern conquest, which rationalized the domination of nature. Youth were the masters of scientific method, through which nature was dissected, examined, and found repulsive. Once this discovery was made, so was the decision that nature, like all repulsive things, must be reformed and reconstituted. In fact, together with all of the many scientific and un-natural discoveries outlined in the urban spaces of modern fiction, a corresponding barbarity that remained unaware of new developments was also discovered and invented.

This youth turned away from nature to become an existence that organized and operated machines. But the modern city they built grew into a mechanical form of nature that operated upon a now mechanical man. And violence returned; when unable to become one with a moving machine, people sustained injury. There appeared both suicides and accidental deaths linked to automobiles, streetcars, and tall buildings. Those who went on living became sensory machines reacting to mechanical stimuli from radios and headlights. Movements were directed by the layouts of streets, schedules of trains, heights of buildings, and traffic signals, while sensibilities were constituted by neon signs, record sounds, and sirens.

John Frankl, Yonsei University

Yi Hyosok’s novel Pyokgong muhan, or Endless Blue Sky, was serialized in 1940 and published in book form in 1941. The work’s title, mirroring much of its content, suggests an expansive frontier of transnational possibilities that militate against many of the current understandings of life in Seoul during the Japanese colonial period. Colonial rule was forced upon Korea, but this fact alone is insufficient to explain its variegated repercussions and benefits to certain sectors of the population. The railroads, automobiles, and even airplanes of empire transported Koreans, now second only to the Japanese in status, for business and pleasure, from Seoul to Europe and the South Seas. And, in this particular work, they brought Seoul, Harbin, and Russia into an intermingling of bodies and cultures that has yet to be duplicated.

Post-liberation (1945) nationalist criticism has been largely silent on this important work, primarily because it does not fit a revisionist agenda in which all Koreans must be victims, all Japanese oppressors. But removing discourse from national parameters opens up new vistas. Seeing the transnational and cosmopolitan character of Korean intellectual life and consumer culture in the early twentieth century aids in understanding a similar transnationalism—or even anti-nationalism—in the pursuits and writings of individuals. Modernity, regardless of national origin, brought certain currents to the peninsula, currents upon which certain Koreans were carried away. For them, the promise of modern life seems to have outweighed the promise of national life.