[KS] CFPs for 2018 MLA Convention_Korean Literature

[Heekyoung Cho]

Dear Colleagues,



Please find below THREE CFPs for the sessions that Korean Forum organizes
for the upcoming 2018 MLA (Modern Language Association) Convention to be
held in New York City, January 4-7, 2018.  The deadline for the submission
is March 15, 2017.



Thank you,

Heekyoung Cho
Assistant Professor
Department of Asian Languages & Literature
University of Washington





*Community in the Wake of the Social: Literary Insecurities in Modern and
Contemporary Korea*



“The gravest and most painful testimony of the modern world,” wrote
Jean-Luc Nancy, "is the testimony of the dissolution, the dislocation, or
the conflagration of community."  At the same time, Nancy warns against a
nostalgia for lost community that masks the fact of its “belated
invention.”  Community, according to Nancy, lies not at the origins of the
social, but is rather what happens “*in the wake of *society."



The ontological significance of a literature that relies on the category of
“nation” is challenged in an era of globalization and migration; literature
as a particular and well-defined aesthetic practice or form is disrupted as
boundaries with other cultural products, particularly in the digital era,
are perforated or redrawn.  New technology and media and concomitant forms
of sociality have resulted in a “generic” insecurity that calls into
question the status of literature as a repository of communal memory while
at the same time expanding its potential as an expression or performance of
community.



This session seeks papers that critically address literary representations
of community and/or the idea, practice, and status of the literary
community itself in the Korean context.  We are particularly interested in
papers that deal with both the literary representation of community *and* the
performance of literary community in various forms of media.  Please
send a 250-word
abstract and 1-p CV by March 15, 2017 to Heekyoung Cho (hchohcho at uw.edu) or
Chris Hanscom (chanscom at ucla.edu).







*Auditory Text in Premodern and Modern Korean Literature*



Not only is literary text inscribed and read but is also voiced for the
readerly ears. Does this renewed attention to sound and listening alter the
way we read and understand literature in any significant manner? How might
we seek a new understanding of the text’s voicing as integral to our
literary reading? Does Korean literature offer any interesting instances
where the meaningful readerly listening takes place with little or no
visual access to the object of comprehension? Is there any meaningful
boundary between what is oral and what is written in Korean literary
contexts? How might we methodologically embed sound into Korean literary
and cultural studies?

Marking a sharp turn from vision-centered literary and media analysis, this
panel re-centers voice, hearing, and listening as ways to explore the
cultural and political complexities of soundscape in premodern and modern
Korean literature and culture. As part of the Korean Language, Literature,
and Culture Forum session for the 2018 MLA Convention (New York), the panel
seeks papers that examine the ways in which polyphonics, multiculturalism,
technology, gender, and politics, among others, in the Korean context form,
generate, and qualify the experiences of sound in the text. We especially
welcome papers that discuss voice, hearing, and listening as *embodied or
disembodied* textual experiences and also those work that explores auditory
textual experimentation in various genres of premodern and modern Korean
literature including new ways of understanding poetry, in which sound image
traditionally has been treated as important. Deadline for submission of 250
word abstract and 1-p CV is 15 March 2017 to Jina Kim (kimji at dickinson.edu)




*Thinking Korean Literature through Censorship and “Blacklisting” in the
Age of Global Literature*

Censorship and “blacklisting” are two of the most widely practiced methods
of publication control by the state. From its inception, Modern Korean
literature has undergone systematic censorship by agents of the Japanese
colonial government. Although such prepublication censorship laws and
operations have formally ceased in post-liberation Korea, publication
control persists. Explicit or implicit self-censorship by authors, editors,
and publishing houses also besets modern Korean literature. Most recently,
the revelation that South Korean Park Geun Hye’s regime sponsored
“blacklisting” operations and secretly controlled the disbursal of
financial subsidies for publication stunned Korean civil society, whose
formal democratization presumably ended the era of publication control.

The unending story of Korean literary publications and figures being
subjected to state control impels us to rethink fundamental and theoretical
notions of literature, authorship, and art. What modes of reading should
literary critics and historians bear on censored literature and
“blacklisted” writers? How do censorship and “blacklisting” complicate
paradigms like Roland Barthes’s “death of the author” and Michel Foucault’s
“author function”?  How has publication control by the state weakened or
strengthened the so-called literariness of literature? The panel invites
papers that address questions of literary history and interpretive methods
about the instability of literature as an institution under state control.
We especially seek approaches that substantially or implicitly intervene in
the idea of world literature through concrete cases of censored works and
“blacklisting” or other forms of state intervention into the writing and
publication of literature. 250-word abstract and 1-p CV by March 15,
2016; Kyeong-Hee
Choi (kchoi at uchicago.edu).
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