My dissertation, entitled, The Origin of Korean Trauerspiel: Gwangju, Stasis, Justice, argues that the vertiginous vicissitudes of contemporary South Korea since 1997 can be best described in terms of what Walter Benjamin calls Trauerspiel, or Mourning Play. This project identifies the 15-year period as the time-space of a series of suspended and thwarted mourning, in which death, be it in the past or present, hardly partakes of the economy of justice or sacrifice as it putatively does in tragedy in view of a new community to come. Drawing attention to the peculiar interplay between two contemporary catalysts of stasis, or civil war, i.e., the special amnesty granted in 1997 to ex-President Chun Doo-Hwan for his executive role in the Gwangju Massacre in May 1980 and the U.S. War on Terror since 2002, for which 3 Korean civilian hostages were kidnapped and brutally executed in 2004 and 2007, I argue that both serve to render naught the sublime causes (e.g. Democracy, Justice, and Peace) as well as human lives sacrificed in relation to them, generating a genuine crisis of politics and ethics. By analyzing contemporary Korean cinema (e.g. films by Park Chan-wook, Bong Jun-ho, and Kim Jee-woon) and literature (e.g. Kim Hoon) of this period as allegory of this crisis, I show how attempts at doing justice are complicated and increasingly frustrated by progressive dissolution of a series of traditional distinctions between Victim and Perpetrator, Friend and Enemy, and Justice and Vengeance, leading to universal failures of mourning, only to constitute a vast singular Trauerspiel, or Mourning Play.

The thesis is set against the backdrop of literary Chinese as the cosmopolitan written language across East Asia and examines two contemporary literary Chinese writers in the ninth century: Ch'oe Ch'iwǒn from Silla Korea and Sugawara no Michizane from Heian Japan. Though composition in Chinese characters on the peninsula and the archipelago was ancient, a high-water mark within this community appeared in the ninth century. At that time, literary Chinese was embraced by mainstream literati as the medium for poetry and prose, and competent composition in this international written language came to have political as well as cultural significance. The importance of Ch'oe Ch'iwǒn and Sugawara no Michizane as the great masters of Chinese letters in Korea and Japan derives in part from their talents and in part from the social and political acceptance of Chinese. This comparative research primarily draws inspiration from Sheldon Pollock's comparison of the Sanskrit cosmopolis and the Latin cosmopolis. Pollock describes the Latin cosmopolis as coercive and the Sanskrit cosmopolis as voluntaristic. I argue that the history of literary Chinese in East Asia provides a third cosmo-political model for the history of interactions among language, literature, and cultural and military power. The literary Chinese cosmopolis can be characterized not as coercive or voluntaristic but as hegemonic. I compare Ch'oe Ch'iwǒn and Sugawara no Michizane for their cosmopolitan identities, transnational experiences, and diglossic worlds. Though there is debate over the appropriateness of the terms "diglossia," "Chinese cosmopolis," and "Sinographic cosmopolis" to describe the world in which Ch'oe and Michizane lived, I argue in favor of "literary Chinese cosmopolis," because I pay attention to the common grammar, syntax, and other linguistic features one must bear in mind when composing in literary Chinese (as opposed to reading). Localism produced vernaculars, but the unity of the community was based on composition in a cosmopolitan language. That cosmopolitan language was literary Chinese, a hyperglossic language, a language that allowed universal communication in East Asia. Intersecting with various disciplines and bringing several critical fields into conversation, this work contests and refreshes a series of key issues at the heart of discussions on globalization, namely the intrinsic relationship between language and power. How does cultural power emerge from language? How does writing in a "foreign" script articulate ethnic, local identities? As a meditation on language politics, ethics, and the historical situation of an earlier cosmopolitan ecumene (ninth century CE), this work will, I hope, offer insights into the specificities and mechanisms of a past cosmopolitan era in East Asia, even as it establishes a broader historical and ethical context for contemporary debates on globalization.

The work focuses on the literary work of Korean writer Yun Heunggil in the context of modern Korean literature of the 1970s. The first part describes the general features of the literature in the 1970s, with an emphasis on changes in requirements placed on authors and topics in this period of modernization. The second part deals exclusively with the work of Yun Heunggil. Great attention is given to writer's history, as it has a significant influence on his early literary work. In the latter parts, the work deals with two topics, which represent the seventies in the Korean modern literature - Korean War and modernization of Korean society. Then it looks into common features of work and reccuring motifs in both categories, using detailed analysis of narrative sequences. Work also includes a sample translation of one of the author's short stories, The Man Who Left Behind a Nine Pairs of Shoes

In the beginning, the specific problems of the literary translation will be introduced on a theoretical level. Based on the theory, the detailed translatological analysis of chosen Czech translation of Yi Mun Yeol's novel The Poet will follow. The translation will be compared to the original from various points of view. The biggest focus will be on various translation methods and strategies used for the transfer of the lexical and grammatical expressions, the information structure organization of the target text, cases of amplification, reduction, etc. The attention will be also focused on non-linguistic aspects of translation, such as transferability of cultural and historical facts to a distinct environment.

This dissertation examines how modern literature in China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan in the late-nineteenth to the early-twentieth centuries was practiced within contexts of these countries' deeply interrelated literary traditions. Premodern East Asian literatures developed out of a millennia-long history of dynamic intra-regional cultural communication, particularly mediated by classical Chinese, the shared traditional literary language of the region. Despite this transnational history, modern East Asian literatures have thus far been examined predominantly as distinct national processes. Challenging this conventional approach, my dissertation focuses on the translational and intertextual relationships among literary works from China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, and argues that these countries' writers and critics, while transculturating modern Western aesthetics, actively engaged with the East Asian cultural tradition in heterogeneous ways in their creations of modern literature. I claim that this transnational tradition was fundamentally involved in the formation of national literary identities, and that it enabled East Asian literati to envision alternative forms of modern civilization beyond national particularity. The dissertation is divided into three parts according to the region's changing linguistic conditions. Part I, "Proto-Nationalisms in Exile, 1880s-1910s," studies the Chinese literatus Liang Qichao's interrupted translation and adaptations of a Japanese political novel by the ex-samurai writer Shiba Shiro and the Korean translation and adaptations of Liang Qichao's political literature by the historian Sin Ch'aeho. While these writers created in transitional pre-vernacular styles directly deriving from classical Chinese, authors examined in Part II, "Modernism as Self-Criticism, 1900s-1930s," wrote in newly invented literary vernaculars. This part considers the critical essays and the modernist aesthetics of fiction by Lu Xun, Yi Kwangsu, and Natsume Soseki, founding figures of modern national literature in China, Korea, and Japan, respectively. Part III, "Transcolonial Resistances, 1930s-40s," addresses the wartime period, when the Japanese Empire exploited the regional civilizational tradition to fabricate the rhetoric of the legitimacy of its colonial rule. This part especially explores the semicolonial Chinese writer Zhou Zuoren, and the colonial Korean and Taiwanese writers Kim Saryang and Long Yingzong, who leveraged that same civilizational tradition and the critiques thereof, in order to deconstruct Japanese cultural imperialism outside of nationalist discourses. / East Asian Languages and Civilizations

This dissertation is a cultural history of total war (ch’ongnyŏkchŏn) mobilization in South Korea from the 1946 outbreak of mass uprisings in the U.S.-occupied southern provinces to the withdrawal of Republic of Korea Army (ROKA) troops from the Vietnam War in 1973. It focuses more specifically on the role of cultural production in programs of anticommunist pacification in postcolonial South Korea. Following the collapse of the Japanese Empire and the division of the Korean peninsula in 1945, U.S. and South Korean elites confronted popular insurgencies in Taegu (1946), Cheju Island (1948-49), and South Chŏlla Province (1948). Acknowledging the mass character of these rebellions, anticommunist ideologues emphasized the importance of campaigns—variously referred to as culture war (munhwajŏn), thought war (sasangjŏn), or psychological warfare (simnijŏn)—targeting the home front (hubang) as a refuge for communist subversion. Cultural production would remain a central element of war mobilization in the subsequent Korean War (1950-1953) and Vietnam War (1965-1973), as well as in the militarized village development schemes of the 1950s and 1960s. In exploring the cultural dimension of unending war in divided Korea, this dissertation draws on a wide variety of documentary media, including roundtables, war correspondence, reportage, travelogues, ethnographies, memoirs, diaries, realist literature, illustrations, photographs, and oral histories, among other such sources. These genres, often sponsored or otherwise influenced by the state, functioned to investigate the historical causes of insurgency and propose suitable modes of prevention. From the mid-1940s to the mid-1970s, such investigations evolved, moving from a post-liberation fixation on repatriated “war victims” (chŏnjaemin) to studies of other displaced groups purportedly vulnerable to communist subversion: refugees, POWs, vagrants, juvenile delinquents, peasants, lepers, and, in the Vietnam War, National Liberation Front (NLF) recruits. In South Korea, documentary media was emblematic of a Cold War “exhibitionary complex” founded upon claims to a pure reality unmediated by ideology. This study argues that the peculiar conditions of divided Korea ensured that anticommunist exhibitions did not just broadcast the messages of power but served in themselves to display and facilitate punishment. I further argue that the functional nature of embedded texts—as mechanisms of identification and surveillance as well as representation—lies behind their value as historical sources. This dissertation also argues for a conception of South Korean militarism (kunsajuŭi) capable of integrating such artifacts of literary, mass, and popular culture. Building on and departing from the foundations of South Korean anticommunist ideology in the 1940s and 1950s, the Park Chung Hee regime (1961-1979) offered a vision of the North Korean enemy as invisibly embedded in the socioeconomic contradictions of the home front. The Park-era discourse of “indirect invasion” (kanjŏp ch’imnyak) projected the masses as a hotbed of potential subversion, encouraging new forms of civilian participation in the militarized development schemes of the 1960s. The participation of non-state actors—whether as philanthropists, entrepreneurs, educators, proselytizers, performers, writers, or artists—in the reproduction and justification of war at home and in South Vietnam throughout the 1960s is one critical aspect of South Korean militarism overlooked in existing studies. This total mobilization of an emergent civil society into war and militarized development, however, produced unintended consequences, obstructing reporters’ attempts to represent the Vietnam War and incentivizing the exploitation of labor export programs and support initiatives aimed at the home front. These contradictions helped fuel the re-emergence, in late 1960s and early 1970s South Korea, of documentary writing as a vehicle of anti-capitalist critique rather than state propaganda.

No description available.

The book Paegŭi Kŭrimja (One Hundred Shadows) written by Hwang Jungeun (Hwang Jŏngŭn) was published in 2010 and translated by Jung Yewon (Chŏng Yewŏn) in 2016 after its success throughout South Korea.  It does not yet exist an official translation in Swedish and therefore, in order to make a comparative analysis about the differences in translation between Korean, English and Swedish, which is the author of the present thesis’ native language, the author have translated a part of the book (pages 1-40) during a course in Korean literature translation into Swedish. This thesis will be specifically focused on how the Korean onomatopoeias in the book have been changed through translation and what difference that creates for the meaning and nuance of the source text. This thesis uses a comparative qualitative method to examine how the onomatopoeias in the book have been affected by the English and the Swedish translations where the author found that there were some onomatopoeias that were more affected by translation than others, whereas omission was found to be the most used translation strategy, which resulted in some loss of nuance, but that no meaning was lost when omitting or changing the onomatopoeias. This thesis also compares the differences of the English and Swedish translations which were also considered to be minimal and disregarding one’s personal stylistic choice, the author found both translations to be appropriate and was therefore also not considered to affect the text in a significant way. The author hopes that further research about onomatopoeias and their place in translation will be studied in the future, as well as translation between Korean-English and Korean-Swedish to further expand and discover the Korean-English and Korean-Swedish literature area.

The thesis analyzes the Czech translation of Korean novel The Vegetarian by Han Kang. First, the relevant theory of translation is presented, then the means of spoken Czech and Korean are analyzed. At the end of the theoretical part of the work, the researcher briefly deals with the issue of speech of characters in literature and mentions the specifics of literary translation with regard to aesthetic and pragmatic effects of the way speech acts were transformed to the target language. The practical part of the thesis consists of a comparative analysis of passages of the source and target text based on Pym's typology of translation solutions. Particular attention will be paid to passages of the characters' speech and the ways in which it was translated from Korean into Czech.

[pt] Esta dissertação de mestrado investiga um corpus de dez antologias de literatura coreana traduzida, publicado no Brasil entre 1985 e 2022. Foi observada a prática de antologização da literatura coreana traduzida no Brasil, com intuito de verificar a criação de imagens resultantes dos critérios de seleção, tradução e apresentação dessa literatura com base na análise de seus paratextos, evidenciando-se a atuação dos agentes de reescrita. A fundamentação teórica utilizada é oriunda dos Estudos da Tradução, especialmente os campos dos Estudos Descritivos da Tradução (DTS) e da Sociologia da Tradução, e da Teoria do Paratexto. Verificou-se, com base no corpus, que o ato de antologizar divide-se em três atitudes: (1) construir, na qual estão em evidência os critérios de seleção dos textos e o contexto de publicação das obras; (2) desenhar, em que é verificado como o paratexto visual comunica visualmente os projetos editorial e tradutório das antologias; e (3) enquadrar, na qual, por meio dos prefácios, foram identificadas as estratégias de produção de discursos acerca da literatura coreana. No exame dos prefácios, os agentes destacados foram os tradutores, colaboradores e autoridades da cultura de chegada, que assumem, a partir de seu lugar de produção de discurso, um papel fundamental na inserção da literatura coreana no Brasil. Nas décadas de 1980 a 2000, observou-se uma contribuição central dos agentes na publicação dessa literatura, por meio das antologias dedicadas a diferentes autores e correntes literárias. Da década de 2010 em diante, as antologias alinharam-se às tendências editoriais atuais em diálogo com a crescente apreciação de produtos culturais coreanos no Brasil. / [en] This Master s thesis proposes the investigation of a corpus of ten anthologies of translated Korean literature published in Brazil between 1985 and 2022. The practice of anthologizing Korean literature translated in Brazil was observed in order to verify the creation of images resulting from the criteria for selecting, translating and presenting this literature, based on an analysis of its paratexts, highlighting the actions of the agents of rewriting. The theoretical basis used comes from Translation Studies, especially the fields of Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS) and the Sociology of Translation, and from Paratext Theory. Based on the corpus, it was verified that the act of anthologizing is divided into three attitudes: (1) constructing, in which the criteria for selecting the texts and the context in which the works were published are underlined; (2) designing, in which it is verified how the visual paratext communicates the editorial and translation projects of the anthologies; and (3) framing, in which, through the prefaces, the strategies for producing discourses about Korean literature were identified. In examining the prefaces, the agents highlighted were translators, collaborators and authorities from the target culture, who assume, from their place of discourse production, a fundamental role in the insertion of Korean literature in Brazil. From the 1980s to the 2000s, agents made a central contribution to the publication of this literature through anthologies dedicated to different authors and literary currents. From the 2010s onwards, the anthologies have aligned with current publishing trends in parallel with the growing appreciation of Korean cultural products in Brazil.