The Real Modern: Literary Modernism and the Crisis of Representation in Colonial Korea
The contentious relationship between modernism and realism has powerfully influenced literary history throughout the twentieth century and into the present. In 1930s Korea, at a formative moment in these debates, a “crisis of representation” stemming from the loss of faith in language as a vehicle of meaningful reference to the world became a central concern of literary modernists as they operated under Japanese colonial rule.

Christopher P. Hanscom examines the critical and literary production of three prose authors central to 1930s literary circles—Pak T’aewon, Kim Yujong, and Yi T’aejun—whose works confront this crisis by critiquing the concept of transparent or “empiricist” language that formed the basis for both a nationalist literary movement and the legitimizing discourse of assimilatory colonization. Bridging literary and colonial studies, this re-reading of modernist fiction within the imperial context illuminates links between literary practice and colonial discourse and questions anew the relationship between aesthetics and politics.

The Real Modern challenges Eurocentric and nativist perspectives on the derivative particularity of non-Western literatures, opens global modernist studies to the similarities and differences of the colonial Korean case, and argues for decolonization of the ways in which non-Western literatures are read in both local and global contexts.

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The Real Modern: Literary Modernism and the Crisis of Representation in Colonial Korea
The contentious relationship between modernism and realism has powerfully influenced literary history throughout the twentieth century and into the present. In 1930s Korea, at a formative moment in these debates, a “crisis of representation” stemming from the loss of faith in language as a vehicle of meaningful reference to the world became a central concern of literary modernists as they operated under Japanese colonial rule.

Christopher P. Hanscom examines the critical and literary production of three prose authors central to 1930s literary circles—Pak T’aewon, Kim Yujong, and Yi T’aejun—whose works confront this crisis by critiquing the concept of transparent or “empiricist” language that formed the basis for both a nationalist literary movement and the legitimizing discourse of assimilatory colonization. Bridging literary and colonial studies, this re-reading of modernist fiction within the imperial context illuminates links between literary practice and colonial discourse and questions anew the relationship between aesthetics and politics.

The Real Modern challenges Eurocentric and nativist perspectives on the derivative particularity of non-Western literatures, opens global modernist studies to the similarities and differences of the colonial Korean case, and argues for decolonization of the ways in which non-Western literatures are read in both local and global contexts.

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The Real Modern: Literary Modernism and the Crisis of Representation in Colonial Korea

The Real Modern: Literary Modernism and the Crisis of Representation in Colonial Korea

by Christopher P. Hanscom
The Real Modern: Literary Modernism and the Crisis of Representation in Colonial Korea

The Real Modern: Literary Modernism and the Crisis of Representation in Colonial Korea

by Christopher P. Hanscom

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Overview

The contentious relationship between modernism and realism has powerfully influenced literary history throughout the twentieth century and into the present. In 1930s Korea, at a formative moment in these debates, a “crisis of representation” stemming from the loss of faith in language as a vehicle of meaningful reference to the world became a central concern of literary modernists as they operated under Japanese colonial rule.

Christopher P. Hanscom examines the critical and literary production of three prose authors central to 1930s literary circles—Pak T’aewon, Kim Yujong, and Yi T’aejun—whose works confront this crisis by critiquing the concept of transparent or “empiricist” language that formed the basis for both a nationalist literary movement and the legitimizing discourse of assimilatory colonization. Bridging literary and colonial studies, this re-reading of modernist fiction within the imperial context illuminates links between literary practice and colonial discourse and questions anew the relationship between aesthetics and politics.

The Real Modern challenges Eurocentric and nativist perspectives on the derivative particularity of non-Western literatures, opens global modernist studies to the similarities and differences of the colonial Korean case, and argues for decolonization of the ways in which non-Western literatures are read in both local and global contexts.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780674073265
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Publication date: 08/26/2013
Series: Harvard East Asian Monographs , #357
Pages: 248
Product dimensions: 5.60(w) x 8.60(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Christopher P. Hanscom is Assistant Professor of Korean Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction 1

1 Paradox of Empire: The Crisis of Representation in 1930s Seoul Literary Circles 24

2 Pak T'aewon's "Representation, Depiction, Technique" and the Colonial Double Bind 38

3 Modernism and Hysteria in One Day in the Life of the Author, Mr. Kubo 59

4 "Thoughts from a Sickbed" and the Critique of Empiricist Discourse 78

5 The Irony of Language in Kim Yujong's Short Fiction 95

6 Embodiments of Speech: Yi T'aejun's Lectures on Composition 121

7 Lyrical Narrative and the Uncohering of Modernity 138

Conclusion: Colonial Modernism and Comparative Literary Studies 166

Notes 177

Bibliography 213

Index 229

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