[KS] CFP: The Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, on South Korean Speculative Fiction

Tue Apr 26 20:54:37 EDT 2022

Dear colleagues,

The Journal of Fantastic in the Arts is planning a focused issue on South
Korean speculative fiction. The issue signals JFA's drive to broaden its
horizon beyond anglophone SF as an ongoing initiative. The editors are
excited to invite submissions - including original essays (across media)
and book reviews.

Sincerely
Helen (Haerin) Shin, and Sang-Keun Yoo

*Call for Papers*

*Focused Issue Theme: *

*Newtrospection: Reverse-Engineering Modernity in South Korean Speculative
Fiction*

Focused Issue planned for early 2023

Proposal submission deadline: May 31, 2022

Paper submission deadline: August 31, 2022

*The Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts* (*JFA*), published since 1988,
is an interdisciplinary journal devoted to the study of the fantastic in
literature, art, drama, film, and popular media. Published three times per
year by the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts,
*JFA*’s articles
are fully refereed, indexed in the MLA International Bibliography, and
searchable in JSTOR. The editorial collective of *JFA* is currently working
to make the journal indexed in SCOPUS and A&HCI as well. In early 2023 JFA
plans to publish its first focused issue dedicated to South Korean science
fiction and fantasy.

South Korean speculative fiction has a long and rich yet also conflicted
history that spans over a century. Building on the legacy of the fantastic
in premodern literature while also struggling with colonial drives toward
the inculcation of science-technology (*kwahak kisul* – a compound term
devised and systematically promoted as a state-led initiative on industrial
development and lifestyle management), creators and readers of Korean
science fiction have sought diverse pathways to negotiate the anxiety of
influence through critical reappropriation. *Taeguek Hakbo*’s publication
of Jules Verne’s *20,000 Leagues under the Sea *(trans. 1907) for instance
introduced and framed modern technology as the momentum of progress,
whereas Kim Dong-yin’s short story “Dr. K’s Research” (1929) highlighted
the limits of a scientific frame of reference through irony. Despite
pressures to focus on the problems of the here and now in the form of
critical realism, speculative narratives persisted across the mediasphere
throughout the turmoil of the Korean War and compressed development;
creature/cult/horror films served as an outlet for quirky imaginaries in
the ‘60s~’70s, while the comics magazine culture offered a fertile ground
for science fiction narratives throughout the ‘80s~early ’90s. The film
industry has also embraced speculative tropes as inspiration for hybrid
aesthetics after an initial period of struggle (marked by a slew of
unsuccessful blockbusters in the early 2000s); television dramas, streaming
media, and webtoons are actively embracing the genre as the source of
creative momentum; and videogames, in particular, are thriving in the land
of the fantastic. In the domain of written literature, fantasy spearheaded
the break from the longstanding tradition of critical realism in pace with
South Korea’s economic and political stabilization in the ‘90s, and science
fiction has become the nursery of feminist breakthroughs to attract global
attention over the past decade – an ever-peculiar (yet all the more
welcome) state of affairs given the predominantly masculine vector of the
genre’s history, paired with the patriarchic underpinning of the *kwahak
kisul *paradigm.

Even as megahit productions such as *Snowpiercer* (2013), *Train to Busan*
(2016), *Space Sweepers* (2021), *The Silent Sea *(2021), and *All of Us
Are Dead* (2022) continue to draw a global viewership, scholarship on South
Korean speculative fiction within anglophone academia has been extremely
sparse. To address this gap, the editors of this focused *JFA *issue shed
timely and much-needed light on the subject across diverse media. The goal
is not to catalogue the genre’s history in South Korea; rather, focus will
be laid upon how South Korean speculative fiction writers and creators
reverse-engineer the Western concept of modernity through reappropriative
maneuvers, taking a deep-dive into the socio-cultural and historical
frameworks as innovative aesthetic and discursive ventures. Hence the
title, *Newtrospection*. *Newtro* refers to a new aesthetic trend in South
Korea, which involves reviving and appreciating aesthetic trends from the
past. The distinction between *retro* and *newtro* lies in that whereas the
former veers toward nostalgia in its texture of appreciation, and as such
signals contextual significance, the latter is more about challenging
existing notions of the hip and/or good in its reconfiguration of
trendiness, subverting the idea that the old is passé while disavowing
associations between futurity and newness with sleek technicity.
Identifying such tendencies in South Korean speculative fiction, the
editors believe that the manner in which recent works *own* and thereby
recontextualize longstanding metrics of desirability effectively
demonstrate a drive to reverse-engineer the core tenets of anthropocentric,
patriarchic, racialized, and colonial paradigms of science and technology.

In addition to scholarly essays on literary texts, the editors also welcome
papers about all forms of creative work, including translations, films,
television dramas, and new media in the genre of speculative fiction
created by South Korean artists or written in Korean. Themes of interest
include, but are not limited to:

·                Comparative definitions, conceptualizations, and
historicizations of science, technology, and sociotechnical imaginaries

·                Modernity, premodernity, and postmodernity

·                Humanism, posthumanism, and transhumanism

·                Retrospection, memory, and the newtro

·                Nationalism, coloniality, Orientalism, Occidentalism, and
Techno-Orientalism

·                Viruses, microorganisms, zombies, monsters, animals,
plants, nonhumans, and sentient beings

·                Robots, artificial intelligence, cyborgs, genetics, and
bioengineering

·                Ghosts, goblins, gods, demigods, myth, folklore, and
supernatural beings.

The length of articles generally varies from 5,000 to 9,000 words and
ranges from 20 to 30 pages. Please send a title and a 400-word abstract to
guest editors Haerin Shin, Korea University (helenshin at stanford.kr) and
Sang-Keun Yoo, UC Riverside (syoo015 at ucr.edu) by May 31, 2022. Authors of
accepted proposals will be contacted soon thereafter and asked to submit
full papers by August 31, 2022. All papers will be subject to blind peer
review.

*Call for Book Reviews*

We also have several books available for review for *The Journal of the
Fantastic in the Arts*. These reviews would be due August 31, 2022.  If you
have a completed Master's degree or higher, one of these books is in your
field of study, and you are committed to writing a review for us, please
contact the guest editors at the above email addresses, noting your
preferred title and your mailing address.  The reviews need to be between
500 and 1,000 words and documented in MLA style.

*Available Titles*

1.     *Readymade Bodhisattva: The Kaya Anthology of South Korean Science
Fiction*. Kaya Press.

2.     *I'm Waiting for You: And Other Stories*. Bo-Young Kim.
HarperCollins.

3.     *On the Origin of Species and Other Stories*. Bo-Young Kim. Kaya
Press.

4.     *Everything Good Dies Here: Tales from the Linker Universe and
Beyond*. Djuna. Kaya Press.

5.     *The Hole: A Novel*. Hye-young Pyun. Arcade

6.     *City of Ash and Red: A Novel*. Hye-young Pyun. Arcade

-- 
Sincerely
Helen Shin
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://koreanstudies.com/pipermail/koreanstudies_koreanstudies.com/attachments/20220427/5f907372/attachment.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: Call for Papers (JFA special issue-Korean SF)_CA_JW_SK (1).docx
Type: application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document
Size: 22163 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://koreanstudies.com/pipermail/koreanstudies_koreanstudies.com/attachments/20220427/5f907372/attachment.docx>