[KS] Kyujanggak Colloquium: Paik Nak-chung and the Practice of Dissident Reading

[Sem]

Dear Colleagues,
Please join us next Thursday (1 May!) for another edition of the Kyujanggak Colloqiuium. As usual, it will start at 4 PM and take place in the seminar room of the Kyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies. Susan Hwang  (Univ. of Michigan) will talk on "Summoning the Specter of D.H. Lawrence: Paik Nak-chung and the Practice of Dissident Reading in South Korean Literary Criticism." 
Abstract:Broadly speaking, this presentation examines the ways in which historically engaged readings of Western literature in contemporary South Korean literary criticism functioned as a privileged site for both interpretation of Euro-American texts for South Korean audience and for interpretation of social, political, and literary phenomena in South Korea.  In this presentation I focus on the literary critic Paik Nak-chung’s readings of D.H. Lawrence, an early 20thcenturyBritishwriter. Paik’s sustained interest in Lawrence throughout his extensive career as a theorist, translator, political activist, and editor becomes all the more curious when we take into account the fact that, among literary critics in the West, Lawrence is most often categorized as a reactionary among “left-wing” literary critics.  
   Specifically, I will be looking at the connections that Paik draws between his readings of Lawrence, of Korean literature, and of Korean society from three different times (1969, 1982, and 2011) in Paik’s career as a literary critic.  This selection of Paik’s works as such is deliberate to some extent, to show how Paik mobilizes his readings of Lawrence to comment on key moments in South Korean literature, society, and politics over the span of nearly fifty years – including, but not limited to, the primacy of the individual over the collective in literature in the 1960s, the hegemony of “the American Dream” versus anti-Americanism in the 1980s, and the push for democratic change in South Korean politics in recent years.  In so doing, this presentation attempts to illuminate upon how such strategic foreign provenance challenges received notions of national boundaries in Korean literary criticism, as well think about such a turn to Western literature in ways alternative to the hackneyed rationale of the “authority of the West.” 
for more information:http://kyujanggak.snu.ac.kr/_Board/Detail.jsp?type=13 
Sem Vermeersch

Associate Director, 

International Center for Korean Studies

Seoul National University

599 Gwanangno, Gwanak-gu, Seoul 151-742

Tel. +82-2-880-4038
 		 	   		  
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