[KS] CFP Four Korea Panels for MLA (Chicago, Jan.3-6, 2019)

[KH Choi]

Dear Colleagues: Please circulate the following call-for-papers for
Korea-specific panels proposed for the Modern Language Association
Convention to be held in Chicago, January 3-6, 2019. For this convention,
the MLA will collaborate with the American Historical Association (AHA),
whose convention is scheduled to be in Chicago at the same time as the MLA.
“In an effort to promote collaboration among the humanities,” it has been
announced, “each association will honor the other’s attendee badges.”



*Panel 1: Placing ‘Literary Fame’ in Late Chos**ŏ**n Korea*

A hitherto understudied topic, “literary fame” of the writer or the text is
pivotal to the understanding of the literary landscapes of Chosŏn Korea
from the eighteenth to early twentieth century. How did the reputation of
an author or a text or a corpus of texts encourage or discourage reading in
the late Chosŏn period? What books—and what aspects of books—inspired
people to pick up their brushes and follow their creative impulses,
generating various traces of hypertextuality from marginalia through
miscellaneous and anecdotal records to translation and adaptation? What
roles did book lenders, peddlers, and printers play in the shaping of
public recognition of an already-known piece of writing or writer? For
example, did their endeavors to increase transactions involve manipulation
of fame? How did readers personally create titles and entries in
commonplace books to collect and organize information about famous texts?
How was reputation steered and negotiated through the politics of class,
gender, genre and literary languages, and the dynamics within given
socioliterary communities? To what extent was literary fame, indeed, a
motive and a consequence for textual production and reproduction?  In order
to foster a reader-oriented method that serves to enrich the study of the
book culture and literary practices of traditional Korea, the panel
explores diverse perspectives on famous texts, examining the ways in which
reputed books transformed the conceptualization of literature in late-Chosŏn
Korea. 250-word abstract and one-page c.v. by March 11, 2018, to Si Nae
Park (sinaepark at fas.harvard.edu).



*Panel 2: Giving the Lie to History: Literary History and Literary Practice
in Korea*

In light of what Nichanian calls the historiographic stranglehold, one that
"forbids any consideration of the event outside the coordinates of the
fact," this panel aims to consider definitions of literary practice both
within and without a framework of evidentiary truth and its reliance on
often unexamined assumptions regarding the relation between the historical
real and the literary text.  Asking in what ways literary classification
prefigures our understanding of the definition of literature (or the
understanding of individual texts) opens onto the larger question of a
politics of literary practice outside both the framework of the nation (or
national language) and a system of aesthetic judgment that relies on
positive correspondence with historical reality as the basis for its
assignment of literary value—that is, for its definition of literature.
How do (literary) histories determine what can or cannot be said in a work
of literature?  How does literature work to validate, or to exceed, the
boundaries of the sayable? The panel seeks papers addressing definitions of
literary practice in Korea, and ways in which such practices have been
classified in literary history.  250-word abstract and one-page c.v.
by March 11, 2018, to Chris Hanscom (chanscom at ucla.edu).



*Panel 3: Censorship and Reading as Textual Production in Modern Korea*

The reader looms large in the role of meaning-maker of the censored text,
if not as large as the author. So too does the colonial censor, external
and internal. What innovative methodology should be then designed to
account for this line of literary modernity in which both the censor, the
official reader affiliated with the colonial state, and the ‘ordinary’
reader played a constitutive role from its very inception? To what extent
can a scholar probe into the formative transactions, explicit and implicit,
between the literary writer and the state censorship agent, whose traces
are often eclipsed in the publication? Of what new methods of reading
should a literary scholar conceive when his or her object of inquiry is a
product of the systematic prepublication censorship? How should we examine
these texts and the visible and invisible splicing of “original” writing
and its attendant edits? How should the scholar-reader incorporate the
texts produced and compiled by the Japanese publication police, along with
the censored texts? Over all, in what ways does the censored tradition of
Korean literature encourage us to reconsider the concept of literature, its
aesthetic autonomy, and the usual prerequisites for world literature? Those
interested in utilizing or integrating textual criticism, translation
studies, transmedial studies, biographical studies, quantitative and other
Digital Humanities methods, and socio-scientific methods are particularly
encouraged to participate in the panel. Send a 250-word abstract and
one-page c.v. to Kyeong-Hee Choi (kchoi at uchicago.edu) by March 11, 2018.



*Panel 4: Writing and Reading Sound: History, Methods, and Practice in
Pre-modern and Modern Korea*

This panel examines the various sonic phenomena that have manifested in
Korea from traditional to modern as they interacted and transacted with the
sensual, social, cultural, semiotic, and narrative dimensions of literary,
performative, and other media texts. Addressing the importance of the
question how the oral-aural ethos has been discursively produced and
practiced in the textual fields, it welcomes --but is not limited to—those
studies that integrate and intersect the following topics with sound
studies: pre-industrial or/and industrial labor; rural and urban
environments; multi- or trans-medial textual forms; industrial and
mechanical production; forms of resistance and protest; gender and
feminism, among others. Underscoring the material heterogeneity of sound
production in the lived environment, the panel also seek papers that
explore the technological history of sound: How do new sound
technologies--such as phonograph, radio, film, television, amplifier,
microphone, MP3 player, smart phone, and so forth--set out to engage in
representational systems?; and how does sound become transformed in the
process of recording and reproduction? The panel is geared to inter- or
trans-medial studies that highlights how sound works to forge new ways of
studying texts, techniques, forms, events, and identities. 250-word
abstract and one-page c.v. by March 11, 2018 to Jina Kim (*kimji at dickinson.edu)
<kimji at dickinson.edu)>*

Note: (1) Each proposed panel will undergo review

(2) Finalized presenters should be enrolled as MLA members.

(3) Panels proposals 3 & 4 above will be submitted for review as MLA-AHA
dual sessions when appropriate papers are collected.

-----

Kyeong-Hee Choi (Chair, Korean LLC Executive Committee, MLA)

Korea Foundation Associate Professor of Korean Studies

Department of East Asian Languages & Civilizations

The University of Chicago

(kchoi at uchicago.edu)
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://koreanstudies.com/pipermail/koreanstudies_koreanstudies.com/attachments/20180217/2280b0e6/attachment.html>