Literature in Colonial Korea
Professor John M. Frankl discusses Korean literature under Japanese occupation 1910-1945.
Hilliard Endowment Lecture by John M. Frankl, Ph.D. (2003, Harvard GSAS)
November 19, 2024
5:00 PM - 6:30 PM
Davidson Math and Science Center (DMSC) Room 104
Professor John M. Frankl is a scholar of Korean and comparative literature. He completed his undergraduate education at UC Berkeley where he majored in East Asian languages, studying both Korean and Mongolian. He went on to complete a master’s degree in modern Korean literature at Yonsei University, where he focused on short fiction from the Japanese colonial period. He then completed a second master’s degree in Regional Studies East Asia and a Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Civilizations, both at Harvard University. His graduate work focused on images of “the foreign” in Korean literary and historical texts. For the past decade, he has moved away from fiction in order to work on the essays of Korea’s premier modernist, Yi Sang (1910–1937). Professor Frankl is currently on sabbatical, affiliated as a Visiting Associate at the Harvard-Yenching Institute.
Lecture Title: The Master’s Duty: Tourism qua Critique of Asymmetrical Japanese Colonial Policies in Yi Sang’s “Miscellaneous Writings by Autumn Lamplight”
The Republic of Korea is currently experiencing an unprecedented surge in tourism, fueled largely by burgeoning global interest in Korean popular music, cinema, television, food, and many other cultural products. As the once outwardly-flowing Korean wave breaks now upon domestic shores, there exist conflicting visions of how best to channel this potent force. These concerns, however, while certainly contemporary, are not altogether new. As early as the mid-1930s, while Korea was still a colony of Japan, Korea’s premier modernist, Yi Sang, was already grappling with the thorny matter of properly presenting Korea to the outside world. Yi rather seamlessly straddled his multiple identities as a Japanese government architect and idiosyncratic Korean artist, colonial subaltern, and loyal subject. Examining certain of his representative essays reveals a sort of situational identity based upon and changing according to geographical and emotional locations, as well as real and imagined interlocutors. In his five-part essay “Miscellaneous Writings by Autumn Lamplight,” written in October 1936, the same month he would venture for the first time to Tokyo, where he would meet his untimely end only a few months later, Yi surefootedly negotiates a rugged terrain of competing identities as a modernist writer, an ethnic Korean, and a subject of Imperial Japan. In the fifth and final installment, “Mistake,” Yi explicitly and audaciously critiques Japanese colonial policy in Korea by meticulously exposing the asymmetry and concomitant hypocrisy involved in the laws and customs regarding hosting Western tourists in the two ostensibly equal countries.d