Ethan Waddell | Between Phonography and Ethnography: The Traditional Singing Voice in South Korean Literature of the 1960s

Korea Colloquium

Ethan Waddell
Assistant Professor of Korean Literature and Culture, Department of Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Colorado Boulder

Ethan Waddell is an assistant professor of Korean literature and culture in the Department of Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Colorado Boulder. He earned PhD degree at the University of Chicago in 2024 with a dissertation entitled “Listening to South Korean Fiction through Popular Songs, 1950s – 1970s.” His dissertation was recognized by the Korean Research Network (KoRN) for a Korean Studies PhD dissertation manuscript workshop and by the Franke Institute for the Humanities at the University of Chicago for a Residential Dissertation Completion Fellowship. His research and teaching interests reside in modern and contemporary Korean literature and popular music. He is currently preparing a book manuscript based on his dissertation as well as a co-translation of Kee Hyung Han’s monograph on censorship and Korean literature, entitled Colonial Spheres of Writing (Singminji ŭi munyŏk, 2019).

Chaired by Nicholas Harkness, Modern Korean Economy and Society Professor of Anthropology; Director, Korea Institute, Harvard University

Abstract:
On the precipice between postwar poverty and rapid economic development, why was it that traditional music and soundscapes came to assume centrality within new forms of creative writing in South Korea? In what ways did writers both anticipate and respond to popular musical trends such as the rise of the husky voice and the revival of colonial-era popular song styles? This paper examines a prominent strand of early-1960s South Korean literature in which writers draw upon the traditional singing voice and its representative popular song genre of t’ŭrot’ŭ (trot) to develop new aesthetic forms. I focus on how the composition of musical and sonic passages enabled writers such as Yi Ŏ-ryŏng (1934-2022), Kim Sŭng-ok (1941-), and Pak T’ae-sun (1942-2019) to negotiate perceived dissonances between the musical cultures that developed organically out of Korea’s long suffering history and more modern musical cultures transplanted from abroad, between sonic authenticity and schizophonic reproduction, and between the rural peripheries and the urban center. Defined in part as forms of phono-ethnographic writing, or attempts to represent an enduring form of Korean cultural identity through a phonographic sensitivity to the textures of the ethnonational soundscape, I argue that these musically and sonically attuned texts were also fundamentally shaped by the cultural cold war, the changing social organization of sound reproduction, and by the geopolitical realignments of the era.

Generously supported by the Sunshik Min Endowment Fund for the Advancement of Korean Literature at the Korea Institute, Harvard University