A Comparative Study of Korean Literature: Literary Migration

182 Pages·2016·2.047 MB·English

by  Sangjin Park (auth.)

A COMPARATIVE
STUDY OF KOREAN
LITERATURE
Literary Migration
Sangjin Park
A Comparative Study of Korean Literature

Sangjin   Park
A Comparative Study
of Korean Literature
Literary Migration
Sangjin   Park
College of Liberal Arts
Busan University of Foreign Studies
Busan, Korea (Republic of)
ISBN 978-1-137-55717-9 ISBN 978-1-137-54882-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-54882-5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016947646
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2 016
This book is published with the generous support of the International Center for Korean
Studies, Korea University’s Center for research, publication, and development in Korean
Studies. The International Center for Korean Studies was established in 2003 to support
scholarship and exploration of Korea in the humanities and social sciences, and to promote
new research in Korean Studies to a wide international audience.
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifi cally the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
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The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specifi c statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
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Cover illustration: © JacopoDR / Alamy Stock Photo
Printed on acid-free paper
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature
The registered company is Nature America Inc. New York
A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book is the result of my career as a scholar of comparative literature.
I would like to thank the colleagues with whom I discussed general and
particular details of this book in conferences at the Committee on Literary
Theory, ICLA, AAS, ACLA, and AAIS, as well as in talks at the University
of Connecticut and the University of Pennsylvania, and in particular Lino
Pertile, Sowon Park, Takayuki Yokota-Murakami, and Paul Oldfi eld. It
goes without saying that any errors of fact or judgment and infelicities of
style remain entirely my own. I am grateful to Busan University of Foreign
Studies, Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Korea
University (ICKS) for providing me with positions and opportunities for
concentrating on this work. I also express my appreciation to all the staff
at Palgrave Macmillan involved in this book. I especially thank my family
for their help and encouragement.
Certain parts of this book have been published previously, as follows:
Chap. 1 in A rcadia 43 (2008); Chap. 2 in the book O ther Modernisms
in an Age of Globalization (Heidelberg: Carl Winter. 2002); Chap. 3 in
Korea Journal 48:1 (2008); Chap. 4 in A cta Koreana 15:2 (2012); and
Chap. 5 in Journal of Global Initiatives 5:2 (2010). I am grateful to the
editors for their generous permission to republish the aforementioned
parts.
v

C
ONTENTS
1 Introduction 1
2 The Condition of “East Asia” Discourse: The Concept
and Practice of De-homogenization 1 7
3 Porous Modernity: Overcoming Modernity in the Age
of Globalization 45
4 The World of Circulation: The Universality of Literary
Value in the Guunmong 5 7
5 The Literary Value of Sin Ch‘ae-ho’s Dream Sky:
A Marginal Alteration of Dante’s Comedy 8 7
6 National Language Beyond Nation-States: Cosmopolitan
Vernacular Literary Language in Yi Kwang-Su 121
vii
viii CONTENTS
7 Literature as Sensibility to the Other: Dante in 
Modern Korean Literature 1 35
Bibliography 1 63
Index 1 73
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
1 O PENNESS
The concept of my book is wholly based on the theory of openness, which
provides a way of controlling the contingency of our knowledge and the
world. I defi ne “openness” as the process of an original organization of
disorder, of oscillation between system and disorder, and of a play of pres-
ence and absence. Openness is a process or a fi eld of individual, local,
and decentered interpretation of the world and text, and an unending
interaction between text and reality, which incessantly produces alterna-
tive or counter-interpretations. It is an anti-essentialist concept, for while
essentialism operates unilaterally, and thus protects itself against the pos-
sibility of change, anti-essentialism does not postulate necessary identities
and their relationships. The theory of openness allows for a text which
produces no essential meaning with which everyone ought to agree. This
implies the escape from dogmatic structures of thought and builds up the
individual’s place in the margins of those structures.
My new theoretical context, which is open, porous, and “glocal” (both
global and local), moves away from the system of binary oppositions to
a comparative inquiry that concerns dynamic interactions among many
heterogeneous points in such a way that they maintain their individuali-
ties. I have strived to apply my theoretical context and comparative inquiry
to interpreting and evaluating literary texts and sociohistorical transitions
while oscillating between Korean, East Asian, and European contexts.
In this process, I tried to employ the role of a comparatist who should
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 1
S. Park, A Comparative Study of Korean Literature,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-54882-5_1