[KS] [GWIKS] Premodern Korea Lecture Series with Janet Yoon-sun Lee [01/25]

Mon Jan 23 15:55:03 EST 2023

*The Premodern Korea Lecture Series*

*“Lovesickness in Premodern Korea"*
*Janet Yoon-sun Lee*

*Associate Professor of Korean Literature  Keimyung University*

*Wednesday, January 25, 202209:00 A.M. – 10:30 A.M. Eastern Standard Time
(EST)*

* 11:00 P.M. – 12:30 A.M. Korean Standard Time (KST)     Virtual Event via
Zoom*
Register Here! <https://t.e2ma.net/click/4f2t6i/s2fmn8me/w1xq76>

*Event Description*
In a popular story, “Heart Fire Coiling Around a Pagoda” (Simhwa yot’ap
心火繞塔), Chigwi, a petty officer from the commoner class, falls in love with
Queen Sŏndŏk (fl. 702–737) at first sight. When the queen hears of Chigwi’s
earnest fervor for her, she summons him to a monastery. Chigwi waits for
her at the foot of a pagoda but unfortunately falls asleep. When he learns
that the queen left while he slept, his anger turns him into a burning
fire. This man in passionate love turns himself into a fire demon, which is
suggested to be the consequence of his uncontrollable feelings of
self-pity, anger, and grief, implying that emotional disturbance can result
in physical transformations. The interpretation of the character’s passion
and consequential metamorphosis (or death) tends to yield different and
even competing understandings of emotion and the body.

In this talk, Professor Lee discusses literary representations of
lovesickness in traditional Korean tales and shows how lovesickness can be
envisioned as a nexus of negotiations among passion, the body, and cultural
norms. Specifically in the Chosŏn period (1392-1910), numerous love stories
portray the lovesick characters victimized by this sickness, and the
symptoms tend to eulogize the power of passionate love to override the mind
and physical body. At the same time, lovesickness could be regarded as a
form of Confucian sin and a violation of filial piety. In this talk, the
gendered notion of “dying of love” is used to examine fictional works,
“Unyŏng chŏn” (“Tale of Unyŏng”) and “Sangsa-dong ki” (“Tale of
Sangsa-dong”). Through a gendered reading of those texts, Lee also
discusses how male and female deaths are represented in the texts and also
reveal the link between female death and the cult of female martyrdom. The
talk aims to provide a more nuanced picture of the lovesick figures in
these stories and contends that lovesick bodies are a site of dynamic and
complex interaction between passionate love, the body, and Confucian
doctrine.
*Speaker*
*Janet Yoon-sun Lee*
*Janet Yoon-sun Lee* is Associate Professor in the Department of Korean
Language and Literature at Keimyung University in South Korea. She received
Ph.D. from University of California, Los Angeles. Her research focuses on
the topics of gender and medical science in premodern and early modern
Korean texts, and the major publications include a book chapter,
“Lovesickness and Death in Seventeenth-Century Korean Literature” in The
Routledge Companion to Korean Literature, and research articles: “The
Intertextual Aspect of Women’s Culinary Manuscripts in Chosŏn Korea”; “Tale
of Ch’unhyang’ as Translated by Western Missionaries”; “The Matrix of
Gender, Knowledge, and Writing in the Kyuhap ch’ongsŏ”; “Dilemma of the
Lovesick Hero: Masculine Images and Politics of the Body in
Seventeenth-Century Korean Love Tales”; and “Female Desire, Illness,
Metamorphosis in ‘Lovesick Snake’ Narratives in Sixteenth-Century Korea.
*Moderator*
*Jisoo M. Kim*
*Jisoo M. Kim *is Korea Foundation Associate Professor of History,
International Affairs, and East Asian Languages and Literatures. She
currently serves as the Director of the Institute for Korean Studies and
the Co-Director of the East Asia National Resource Center at GW. She also
serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Korean Studies. She is a
specialist in gender, law, and emotions in Korean history. Her broader
research interests include gender and sexuality, crime and justice,
forensic medicine, literary representations of the law, history of
emotions, vernacular, and gender writing. She is the author of *The
Emotions of Justice: Gender, Status, and Legal Performance in Chosŏn Korea*
(University of Washington Press, 2015), which was awarded the 2017 James
Palais Prize of the Association for Asian Studies. She is also the
co-editor of *The Great East Asian War and the Birth of the Korean Nation*
by JaHyun Kim Haboush (Columbia University Press, 2016). She is currently
working on a book project tentatively entitled *Sexual Desire, Crime, and
Gendered Subjects: A History of Adultery Law in Korea.* She received her
M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia
University.
Click here for the program <https://t.e2ma.net/click/4f2t6i/s2fmn8me/cuyq76>
Future Lectures

*Masato Hasegawa*
(National Taiwan University)
*Politics of Geography and Transport in the Qing-Chosŏn Borderland*
March 1, 2023 | 9:00 AM EST.
Past Lectures
*Franklin Rausch*(Lander University)
*The Famous and the Nameless: The Lives and Afterlives of Chosŏn Catholic
Martyrs*
September 28, 2022, 2:00 PM EDT.
Watch the lecture here. <https://t.e2ma.net/click/4f2t6i/s2fmn8me/smzq76>
*John S. Lee*(Durham University)
*Kingdom of Pines: State Forestry and the Making of Korea, 1392-1910.*
Wednesday October 26, 2022, 2:00 PM EDT.
Watch the lecture here. <https://t.e2ma.net/click/4f2t6i/s2fmn8me/8e0q76>
Founded in the year 2016, the GW Institute for Korean Studies (GWIKS) is a
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Studies (AKS). The mission of GWIKS is to consolidate, strengthen, and grow
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