[KS] Kyujanggak colloquium: Daugher of the Wind

[서울대학교 국제한국학센터]

Dear List Members,

Everybody is warmly invited to the 58th Kyujanggak colloquium, which will take place next Thursday Nov. 3, at 12:30. The speaker will be Stephen Epstein (Victoria Univ. of Wellington), and the topic of his presentation

"Daughter of the Wind: The Travel Writing of Han Bi-ya"

Venue: Kyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies (building 103. Seoul National University), seminar room (ground floor)
For further details, see http://kyujanggak.snu.ac.kr/_Board/Detail.jsp?id=1742&type=13

ABSTRACT
This paper considers the early works of travel writer Han Bi-ya as a set of texts that provide valuable insight into Korean society in the final years of the twentieth century. Writing under the nickname "daugher of the wind" (baram ui ttal), Han first caught the attention of the South Korean public in in the mid-1990s, and her best-selling books combined exuberant accounts of backpacking around the globe with engaging reflections inspired by her travel experience. Most importantly here, her four-volume opus Baram ui ttal: georeoseo jigu sebakwiban (Daughter of the Wind: Three and a Half Times Around the World on Foot) articulate a discourse of knowledge about the world and Korea's evolving place within it. In her writings Han established a persona that, in capturing the imagination of many, has led to her status as both an important role model and a leading female public intellectual in Korea. As this paper argues, however, although Han broke ground in both her methods of acquiring and disseminating knowledge and her frequently fresh viewpoint, she maintains continuity with nationalist Korean discourse. Indeed, her regular emphasis upon her subjectivity as a Korean woman reflects both a productive tension and growing complimentarity between cosmopolitan outlook and nationalist sentiment, a phenomenon that has been salient throughout Korean society in recent years.
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