Date:
Location:
Korea Colloquium
HeeJin Lee
Assistant Professor of Korean Language and Culture, University of Virginia
HeeJin Lee is Assistant Professor of Korean Language and Culture in the Department of East Asian Languages, Literatures & Cultures at the University of Virginia. She is a scholar of Korean literature and culture whose research focuses on establishing connections between modern Korean literature and other literatures from across the world in ways that overcome colonial power dynamics inherent in various approaches to literary comparison. Lee received her Ph.D. from UCLA, her J.D. from the University of Iowa College of Law, and her A.B. from Harvard. Prior to her current position at Virginia, she was a Pony Chung Fellow and Research Professor at the Research Institute of Korean Studies at Korea University.
Chaired by Si Nae Park, Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University
Abstract:
This talk will examine how the Cold War shaped knowledge produced about modern
Korean literature as a national literature—a formulation widely understood to have been first
articulated by Korean intellectuals during the Japanese colonial period as an anticolonial political
project. I show how this understanding itself reflects the contours of anticolonialism permitted
under the Cold War regime of censorship in South Korea, which occluded other possibilities for
critically engaging with modern Korean literature as well as Korea’s colonial past. In doing so, I
return to sinsosŏl̛—long considered foundational to understanding modern Korean literature as a
national literature—to propose one such possibility for thinking beyond the epistemological
parameters set by the Cold War.
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To attend this online event, please register here.
Generously supported by the Sunshik Min Endowment Fund for the Advancement of Korean Literature at the Korea Institute, Harvard University