[KS] Questions about Style and Students-Abroad : 113,000 Korean-national Students receiving 100% 英語講義 英語沒入 敎育 every year in the US....

[Jim Thomas]

Greetings Kye,
Let's not forget the influences of Japanese language and postmodernism on Korean.
 
I can't really speak to anything before the 1970s; but I believe that at that time many texts (usually of mixed script) had the stamp of Japanese language structure due to the profound effect of Japanese language on Korean language during the colonial period and the residual effects of the the generation who learned Japanese and Korean simultanteously during the colonial period and were influential writers into the 50s 60s and 70s. In those years, many "Korean-English" dictionaries were simply copies of Japanese-English dictionaries, because they were so much cheaper to produce and at least a handful of publishers apparently didn't care.
 
Then came post-modernism and the great pre-internet transformation in academic Korean in the 1980s, which I believe occurred through the circulation of western (mostly French and German--or French and German influenced Anglo-American) social theory texts in translation. This had the effect of making many Korean texts so complex to read that Koreans who are well versed in English or other European languages began to complain that texts in those languages were more accessable than translations and corollary texts in Korean. It nonetheless has had a lasting effect on Korean language structure (with Korean academic discourse mimicing the grammatical structures as well as the lexicon of the West), particularly in cultural studies and related fields.
 
Perhaps because the modernization of Japanese language came earlier (in the late 19th and early 20th century) and because Japanese universities did not have such a fetish for hiring those with American or European Ph.D.s, academic and literary Japanese appears to have changed far less than Korean over the last three or four decades.
jim



Date: Tue, 6 Dec 2011 17:07:22 +0900
From: kc.kim2 at gmail.com
To: koreanstudies at koreaweb.ws
Subject: [KS] Questions about Style and Students-Abroad : 113,000 Korean-national Students receiving 100% 英語講義 英語沒入 敎育 every year in the US....

Hi,



This is actually a query about "students-abroad" and "literary style", from the looking-glass of writing styles and their changes throughout the history of Korean.  I hope the Korean literature specialists would help with their insights.  I would also like to ask for the attention of Chinese and Japanese specialists as I believe some comparative perspective would be very helpful.

Impact of students-abroad on the literary styles of home languages:
I guess I am thinking here of early changes, or innovations, to the literary styles of East Asian languages in modern times.  This area seems to be have been rather extensively studied in the case of Japanese and Chinese.  We have for example the 1991 classic ""Rewriting Chinese: style and innovation in twentieth-century" by Edward M. Gunn, providing even a full time-lined and sourced catalog of rhetorical innovations in Chinese, introduced largely by Chinese students-abroad.  And in the case of Japanese, the recent innovations in style, grammar, and even vocabulary have been extensively explored in the many works of Yanabu Akira.  His works have become the focal point of renewed interest by Western scholars examining the transformative role of translation in East Asia; and many of his works are now available in English translation in "Translation in Modern Japan" edited  Indra Levy, recently reissued through Rutledge to meet the growing demand.  Of course, here too, it was the cadre of "Japanese students-abroad" that were at the center of that great literary and stylistic transformation that Yanabu Akira explores for the Japanese case.


The impact of students-abroad, 100 years ago:
It is probably no exaggeration to say students-abroad's impact was fundamental and decisive.  In Korean, somewhat chronologically, we could list, 유길준 (서유견문), 서재필 (독립신문), 윤치호(영어일기/찬양가).  I am inclined to include James S. Gale and Underwood family, as instances of "reverse" students-abroad. I obviously shouldn't omit 이광수 and 김동인.  I am somewhat at a loss as to how to categorize those stylists who never traveled out of the country but nevertheless received 한문몰입, 국어몰입,  일어몰입  or 영어몰입 education. The question is, How did their study-abroad inform/impact their own writing styles?  And how is one to characterize how their styles relate to the writing/literary style that dominates writing/speaking today?

What will the impact of current students-abroad be?
113,000 is a very significant number, and this has been the approximate level for the last ten years.  Still, when I look at the writing style of 홍정욱, the iconic student-abroad in Korea, in 7막7장 (vol. 1 and 2),  I can detect no "stylistic innovation" or "any significantly different.stylistic features"   Are there other stylistic innovations that have taken hold introduced by the New Student-Abroad generation that I am missing?  The general impression is that the smaller cadre of students-abroad of a century ago practically altered the stylistic landscape while the new cadre, numbering in the million now, seems to have little or no impact on the styles.  What is going on?

Regards,

Joobai Lee

12/6/2011




 		 	   		  
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