Korean literature is an overdetermined signifier that incorporates multiple states, languages, and communal experiences based on the assumption of a shared ethnicity. As a national literature, its singularity is disrupted by the historically contingent discursive practices of literary formation, an inherently comparative process that is exacerbated in the Korean case by a multilingual past and the existence of two states known to the world as “Korea.” This essay argues that the current conception of Korean literature is a specifically South Korean construction as a component of the national globalization drive (segyehwa) that began as a predominantly economic project in the 1990s, but took hold as a cultural project in the 2000s. I examine a series of literary events from 2000-2012 organized by the Korean Literature Translation Institute (KLTI), a government agency, and the Daesan Foundation, a private cultural institution that brought local and foreign authors, scholars, and representatives from the publishing industry and local governments with the goal of globalizing Korean literature. These conversations reveal the mechanisms that prioritized literature as a desirable marker of cultural capital and its stakes for South Korea’s claim on Korean culture on the world stage. I show how South Korea’s targeted approach to the contested category of world literature through its own newly developed cultural institutions exposed the fundamental hierarchy of cultural capital based on developmental status that determines inclusion/exclusion in world literature.
목차
Abstract From Korean Literature to K-Literature Cultural Currency: the KLTI International Workshops Civilizational/Cultural Difference at the Daesan Seoul International Forums for Literature One Korean Literature for Multiple Koreas Other “Korean” Literatures Movements for Literary Translation Around the World World Literature: Longing and Belonging References
키워드
globalizationliterary criticismtranslationtransnational cultureworld literature
저자
JENNY WANG MEDINA [ Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry, with an appointment in the Department of Russian and East Asian Languages and Cultures at Emory University to begin in 2019. ]
한국연구원은 1970년 5월 한국 민속의 각 분야에 걸친 자료의 수집과 학술적 연구를 목적으로 '한국민속연구소'로 출발하였다. 그 후 1973년 5월 연구 분야를 확대하며 민속뿐만 아니라 한국학 전반에 걸친 연구를 위해 '한국학연구소'로 개편하였고, 다시 1989년 3월 한국의 국제적 위상의 부상과 함께 한국학 연구의 중요성이 높아짐에 따라 '한국학연구원'으로 확대, 개편하였다. 한국학연구원은 한국학 전반에 걸친 연구를 통해 지역과 민족문화 발전에 기여하며 한국학의 세계화를 위해서 학술활동을 강화하고 나아가 내·외국인에 대한 한국문화 교육을 담당하고자 한다.