Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 247-259).

Thesis (Ph. D.) -- Sŏul Taehakkyo, 1991. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 204-208).

This dissertation examines writings that major Korean intellectuals produced during the Asia-Pacific War, when the Japanese empire embarked upon an aggressive expansion into the Asian continent and eventually entered into war against the United States. As the empire mobilized its colonized populations for the war effort under the banner of imperialization (hwangminhwa/kōminka), the reach of the colonial state penetrated to nearly all aspects of Korean society. As a result, this period has been narrated within postwar nationalist Korean historiography as a particularly traumatic experience. Within this narrative, many of the texts I examine in this dissertation have been explained as the intellectuals' abandonment of their original ideological or philosophical positions of Korean nationalism or anti-imperial socialism to turn "pro-Japanese" (ch'inil/shinnichi, literally "intimate with Japan") in engaging with or supporting the empire's wartime propaganda. But instead of the usual emphasis on the shift or break, I consider the period as a continuation or development of the intellectuals' existing socio-political and cultural concerns, particularly regarding the relationship between the intellectuals and the masses.Although the intellectuals' engagements with the wartime discourses of imperialization, conversion (chŏnhyang/tenkō), and Pan-Asianism - all of which were taken up by the colonial state to mobilize the Korean population - are seen as collaboration with the colonizers, the future that these Korean intellectuals envisioned cannot be adequately explained as "Japanese." Rather, the writers I discuss sought to explore during the late colonial period the possibilities of different alternatives to an older imperialist "universalism," where domination of foreign peoples and lands was justified in the name of spreading universal values. Japan's colonization of Korea under the mission of bringing "civilization and enlightenment" (bunmei kaika) was one most immediate manifestation of the contradiction that such problematic "universalism" brought on in the colony. But the relation between Japan and Korea was not the only problematic site that concerned the Korean intellectuals. They also grappled with issues of increasing social and cultural gap between the urban and the rural, as well as the anxiety that they had merely imitated the West in their pursuit of modernity, at the expense of their own cultural authenticity. In response to these key questions regarding the experience of Korean modernity, Korean intellectuals employed discourses of agrarianism, dialectical materialism, and nativism that had emerged before the wartime period. I examine how the Korean intellectuals continued to explore key elements of these discourses in their discussions of conversion, imperialization, and Pan-Asianism. Through examining editorials, letters of public confessions, and literary texts that narrated instances of ideological conversion whereby individuals critical of imperialism - often from a Marxist position - would come to support the Japanese empire, the first chapter explores how ideological conversion may have served as one of the earliest forms of imperialization. The second chapter delineates the ambivalent stance taken up by the philosopher and cultural critic Sŏ In-sik (1906-?) regarding the East Asian Community (tong'a hyŏptongch'e, tōa kyōdōtai), a vision of a new social order that would overcome the limits of both bourgeois liberalism and fascist nationalism. I demonstrate that while the philosophical basis for the ideals the East Asian Community appealed to Sŏ for its dialectical reasoning, Sŏ also sought to use dialectics to formulate a position of skepticism regarding the realization of the new social order. The third chapter provides a historically contextualized close-reading of essays and literary works by the writer Yi Hyo-sŏk (1907-1942) to demonstrate a case of Korean nativist aesthetics intersecting with multiculturalist Pan-Asian regional identity championed by the Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere to decenter the West. The fourth chapter traces how writers and literary critics such as Ch'oe Chae-sŏ (1908-1964) envisioned the integration of colonial Korea and Japan proper as a dialectical process that would leave both parties fundamentally transformed.By linking these Korean intellectuals' engagements with wartime discourses to their earlier concerns, the dissertation moves away from views of the wartime period as historical aberration and suggests a longer history of imperialization in colonial Korea. It also intervenes in the growing scholarship on the history of Japanese empire by highlighting the engagement of colonized intellectuals. This perspective underscores the ways in which East Asian imperial formations consisted of multiple metropolitan forces, thus illuminating the complex functioning of empire that can often elide a singular colonizer and colonized binary.

This dissertation explores a series of debates about “humanism” (hyumŏnijŭm, indojuŭi) in late colonial Korea, postcolonial North Korea, and postcolonial South Korea. The majority of the existing scholarship on Korean cultural and intellectual history divides the twentieth century along dual fault lines of colonial and postcolonial, North and South, telling a story structured by its seemingly irreconcilable fractures and oppositions. In contrast, my research challenges this vision, showing not only how writers on both sides of the thirty-eighth parallel continued to engage in both direct and indirect dialogue with their colleagues on the other side of the peninsula but also how they did so by returning to a set of discussions from the colonial 1930s: a set of discussions, framed in relation to contemporary ones in France, Japan, and the Soviet Union, about the value of “humanism” as a means of rethinking binaries of political Right and Left and the relationship between the disciplines. One of the first studies to bring literature and thought from both sides of the peninsula together in a joint narrative, this dissertation offers an alternative account both of what national division meant in Korea during this period and of how Korean writers contested and re-imagined it by drawing upon transnational flows of texts and ideas. In chapter one, I describe the emergence of “humanism” (hyumŏnijŭm) as a keyword in the mid 1930s literary criticism of the writer Kim Osŏng. Although Kim took up the term in response to its contemporary usage in the French and Japanese literary domains, his definition of it was drawn equally from a dialectical anthropology first formulated within the publishing sphere of the Korean new religion, Ch'ŏndogyo (Religion of the Heavenly Way), where Kim began his career. Describing how this dialectical anthropology internalized an analytic of contradictions inside the human, I show how Kim's visions of “humanism” not only defined the human in terms of its divisions but also called for a form of disciplinary practice capable of mediating between them. Connecting these visions to contemporary debates about socialist realism and the specificity of literary practice, I show how they laid the groundwork for a self-reflexive turn in fiction writing in the years following the breakup of the Korean proletarian literature movement. In chapter two, I offer a revisionist history of “humanism” in early Cold War South Korea. In particular, I show how critics attempting to re-suture literature to political engagement in support of the ongoing war effort looked back to the past for precedents. Reclaiming the term “active humanism” from the 1930s, these writers found their model in the antifascist “actionism” of André Malraux and they contrasted it, in turn, with the dual forms of “mechanism” found in capitalism and communism. Even as wartime hostilities continued, then, “humanism” came to be linked not only to political mobilization but also – and quite counterintuitively – to a rejection of the “two worlds” system altogether. Finally, I explore how wartime depictions of “friendly fire” and the wartime advent of a UN-sponsored book import program set the stage for postwar discussions of existentialism, Marx as philosopher, and the problem of a “third way” beyond the Cold War binary. In chapter three, I explore a roughly contemporaneous period in North Korea, tracing the emergence of an alternative formulation of the “humanist” imaginary in 1950s literature and criticism. Replacing the earlier term hyumŏnijŭm with that of indojuŭi, North Korean writers of this period used the trope of “humanism” to tie together two interrelated lines of discourse and argumentation: the first concerned itself with the ethics of community and responsibility, often recurring to the ethical demand to be, become, or act like a “human being”; the second concerned itself with literary method and called for the replacement of “mechanical” depictions of processes of production with a reemphasis on human “personality.” Compatible as they were, the concatenation of these two lines of discourse, I argue, nevertheless produced an unexpected outcome: a proliferation of texts, increasingly inward-looking, self-reflexive, and self-critical, focused on the “becoming human” of writers themselves. The effect, then, was not the extinction or erasure of the self but rather its seemingly endless discursive expansion. The road to the “communist new human” here circled back through the individual. In chapter four, I bring the narratives from the previous two chapters together to show how writers in North and South Korea both moved to reclaim aspects of Korean tradition in the late 1950s. First, I show how the critic Ŏm Hosŏk used the Gorky-influenced imaginary of “proletarian humanism” in order to reshape the bounds of the “progressive” past in colonial-era Korean literature. Then I show how this reshaping worked in tandem with a parallel process of excavating the deeper, classical past. Next, I turn to South Korea, taking the early history of PEN-Korea as a point of departure for exploring how writers and critics debated the meaning of nation, nature, and tradition in relation to contemporary imaginations of “world literature” and historical “resistance.” Finally, I conclude with poetry of the April Revolution in the South, showing how the above discussions set the groundwork for a specific way of figuring these events. In chapter five, I turn to the early 1960s in order to tell a connected history of literary production in North and South Korea. Moving beyond the comparative framework of earlier chapters, I here show how the events of the April Revolution of 1960 in South Korea opened up a space for exchange across the thirty-eighth parallel. Although it is often assumed that the physical rigidity of national division has also prevented texts and other media from cross the thirty-eighth parallel, I show that this is not quite true. I begin by describing North Korean reactions to the April Revolution and then show their influence on two interrelated phenomena: the production of texts directed at colleagues in the South; and the reading and interpretation of South Korean texts in the North. I then turn to the South in order to explore the opposite trajectory. In particular, I focus on how discussions of literary purges in the North opened up a new space for discussion of the other side of the peninsula, and I suggest the importance of this development for a new literary and critical imagination in the mid 1960s.

Thesis (M.A.)--Zhongguo wen hua xue yuan, 1977. / Cover title. Reproduced from ms. copy. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--Zhongguo wen hua xue yuan, 1977. / Cover title. Reproduced from ms. copy. Includes bibliographies.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Department of East Asian Languages & Civilizations, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Despite a recent global surge in the reception and translation of Korean women poets, there has been surprisingly little scholarship on this topic. This dissertation aims to expand the focus of Western scholarship beyond the Korean male canon by providing the first in-depth analysis of the works of Korean women poets in the 20th and 21st centuries. The poets I chose to examine for this study played a critical role in revolutionizing traditional verse patterns and in integrating global socio-political commentary into modern Korean poetry. In particular, by experimenting widely with forms from epic narrative, memoir in verse, and shamanic narration to epistolary verse and avant-garde styles, they opened up new possibilities for Korean women's lyric poetry. In addition, they challenged the traditional notion of lyric poetry as simply confessional, emotional, passive, or feminine. Their poetry went beyond the commonplace themes of nature, love, and longing, engaging with socio-political concerns such as racial, class, and gender discrimination, human rights issues, and the ramifications of the greatest calamities of the 20th century, including the Holocaust, the Korean War, and the Kwangju Uprising. Unlike the dominant scholarship that tends to highlight the victimization of women and their role as passive observers, this project shows Korean women poets as active chroniclers of public memory and vital participants in global politics and literature. The multifaceted and detailed reading of their work in this dissertation facilitates a more nuanced understanding of the complexity of 20th-and 21st-century women's lives in Korea. / East Asian Languages and Civilizations

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of History, December 2002. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

"Imagining a Black Pacific" traces a literary history of political and cultural interaction between African Americans and Koreans from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. It argues that black and Korean authors explored literary modes of antiracial solidarity against the Japanese and U.S. empires. Building on diverse archives of U.S. missionary and Korean Christian texts, State Department records, and military documents, as well as literary works, periodicals, and jazz songs, this dissertation examines the mediums and modalities of Afro-Asian aesthetic connection that invoked human freedom and liberation in transnational and multilingual contexts. Black intellectuals and Korean writers drew a parallel between the racialized U.S. and colonized Korea to contest the racial formations of the Japanese empire in an Asian cultural space until the end of the Pacific War. This cross-racial comparison challenged the imperialistic imposition of U.S. politics upon the Pacific Rim during the Cold War era. "Imagining a Black Pacific" is an interdisciplinary project that explores three facets of "Afro-Korean" connectedness: the trans-Pacific literary trajectories of W. E. B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Langston Hughes, Eslanda and Paul Robeson, and J. B. Lenoir; the enduring elaborations of black radicalism by Korean writers such as Yun Chi-ho, Han Heuk-gu, and Bae In-cheol in Korea; and U.S. missionaries' intervention in cultural exchanges between African Americans and Koreans. Examining these three distinctive transcultural encounters, my work brings into focus the complicated configurations of an Afro-Asian alliance. It highlights the self-reflexive disorientation of so-called Afro-Orientalism and explores the experimental commensurabilities between U.S. racism and East Asian colonialism, facilitated by Afro-Korean critical inquiries into two forms of imperialism in Korea, namely, Japan's colonization of Korea and U.S. military intervention in Korea. While scholars have focused critical attention on the political alliance between African Americans and Asians, Korea has gone long unexplored in Afro-Asian conjunctures. By extending the scope of Afro-Asian convergences, this dissertation not only fills in Korea's absence in previous studies but also reconstructs lost legacies of black internationalism in the Pacific. In particular, it reconsiders Afro-Orientalism by exploring Koreans' deployment of African American cultural sources to engender anticolonial discourses. At the same time, it uncovers black intellectuals' investigations of racism in Asian and U.S.-Asian contexts. Afro-Korean connections, or the interplay between African Americans' antiracial sensibility and Koreans' anticolonial consciousness, made sensible the hidden forms of racism in the Japanese and U.S. empires beyond the black-white racial binary. By bridging the long-standing gulf between black and Korean cultures, this study opens up new scholarly terrain in the fields of African American literature and culture, comparative race studies, and Asian/Pacific studies.