KJC Korea
Journal Central

Im Hwa (林和) — pioneer poet, critic and literary historian as well as reviled collaborator and accused spy—is one of the prominent colonial-period authors whose careers remain controversial because twentieth-century Korean history itself still is. Although a wolbuk (越北) writer whose work languished under erasure until post-Park Chung-Hee democratization in the ROK, critical reading of Im in neither the North nor the South halted entirely after his Pyongyang mass show-trial and execution in 1953. Building on early work by Kim Yun-Sik (金充植) in the ROK, Ōmura Masuo (大村益夫) in Japan, and many younger scholars in the U.S., my contribution within my larger project on pro-Japan Korean intellectuals under Japanese rule, is the history of Im’s reception in postwar Japan, where the legacies of shinnichi/chinil (親日) writers animate their own involved, ongoing anxieties over the unresolved historical consensus of the empire’s record of voluntary and involuntary complicity. I focus on Matsumoto Seichō’s (松本清張, 1962–63) biographical novel of Im, Poet of the North (Kita no shijin, 北の詩人). Instrumental in propagating a far from disinterested portrait of Im that still circulates in Japan fifty years after its publication, Poet of the North is evidence of how one writer’s reputation, already distorted by a lifetime spent initially under imperialism and then Stalinism, continues to be manipulated in Japan amid combined colonial revisionism and Cold War politics.

This paper analyzes several films produced in Korea during the era of its colonization by Japan that pose interesting questions about the problem of internalization, or colonization of the mind. While on the one hand, these works can seem to present examples of Korean characters quite literally internalizing the voices or visions of Japanese authority, they can also problematize the assumption that there is a distinct subject with an established “inside” open to absorbing such commands. This is further complicated, I will argue, by the fact that the cinema of the Japanese metropole was itself often contradictory, despite and sometimes because of its place in a colonial empire. These Korean films offer multiple examples of complex subjectivities crisscrossed by split subjectivities and intersubjective relations that render it difficult to clearly demarcate “internal” and “external.” This paper will be one step in an effort to use close stylistic and film analysis to consider the questions of colonial film and cultural colonization on the level of the cinematic text.

While Beckett, with his aesthetics of ignorance and impotence, has often been claimed as an antihumanist, his abiding artistic concern remained the elusive question of the human and its ends or purposes. Admittedly, this humanism is “cruelly humane,” as it compulsively excavates the depths of human abjection, suffering and infirmity; but even as the human remains unknowable in Beckett, the impetus to “go on” with the endeavor is appallingly resilient and affecting — and, artistically, it is remarkably fruitful. What emerges from this inexhaustible drive for ends and purposes, in a world of “finality without end” or “purpose without purposiveness,” is a kind of play, which ranges from the laughable and pitiful to the excruciating and poignant. And it is precisely in this play, I argue, that Beckettian humanism and Beckettian aesthetics converge. Revising the aesthetic tradition of Kant and Schiller, his work rejects the beautiful, and its putative harmonization of the mental faculties, as the privileged and proper domain of art; instead, it activates a confrontational aesthetic, the experience of which is predominantly one of discord and discomfort. Through its play, this aesthetic takes us back to our human finitude, revealing, in place of freedom and transcendence, the indefinite and grimly humorous. For Beckett, then, play seems to be constitutive of both the art and the human, and we are never more human than when we play. The ends and meaning will remain indefinite, but such play may have the capacity to revitalize the imagination and encourage us to go on, wherever that may be.

This study explores the possibility of applying foreignization on Gwon Jeong-Saeng’s Mongsil Eonni. Many scholars of literary translation encourage domestication over foreignization, so there exists insufficient finding on the process of foreignized translation of children’s book and the responses of child and adult readers of such translation. Distancing or alienating the target readers from the Source Text (ST) is considered as undesirable by the supporters of domestication. However, despite the widespread notion of domesticating literary texts, Lawrence Venuti offers ways of applying foreignization when translating literary texts of marginalized culture. He argues that alienation is necessary rather than assimilation when reading texts that contain elements of the marginalized culture. Foreign textual elements found in the foreignized text allow the target readers to acknowledge the cultural differences that are easily overlooked when the ST is domesticated. Translation is known to be a medium or tool in exchanging two cultures but the translation fails to play this role when domestication is used. By applying foreignizing translation strategy on Mongsil, the translation delivers the message that Gwon wishes to tell his readers. The confusion and sorrow felt by Koreans of the North and the South due to sudden division and war are key sentiments that the ST author emphasizes throughout his work. Hence, by preserving the foreignness of the political, ideological and cultural terms and notions from the ST, the translation enables a bidirectional interaction between the target readers and the unfamiliar.

This paper attempts to address the new materialist turn in recent critical thinking at the backdrop of the material vulnerability of global geopolitical conditions of living in which both human and nonhuman are implicated in their deep entanglement via violent ideological and structural orderings/ otherings. Drawing on Diana Cool and Samanta Frost’s New Materialisms (2010) and Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter (2010), the two pioneering texts on “new materialism” and mediating through Jacques Derrida’s notion of hauntological nature of matter, as introduced and extended in Specters of Marx ([1994] 2006), this paper foregrounds the philosophical urgency of such a radical mode of thinking for the possibility of a (new) materially grounded life “to come.” Living in difficult times, it argues, when “time is out of joint” and the history of the living present is haunted by the spectral traces of the past and possible future “to come,” the materiality of matter (its subject/ivity) can never be located in a stable ontological positionality but certainly in the matter’s imbeddedness in hauntological temporality — an emerging posthuman space of transformative possibility where “matter becomes” in its radical mode of living through becoming. This becoming of matter informs as well as transforms the nature as well as the very condition of life: a radical becoming of posthuman life that becomes as well as comes at the same moment foregrounding a process living as complex and open ended but ethically grounded.

We live in a wired town, in which humans and machines mutually generate new forms of ‘beings.’ This is called a transhuman age, in which humans and machines are hybridized as digitally connected to each other. In fact, we humans entered into this transhuman realm a long time ago. Humans are the beings to use tools, with which humans extended bodily capacities and overcame predators. The paper traces the idea of transhumanism back to the notions of philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, who showed that being or all beings living and non-living are organisms. In his philosophy, the paper senses a scent of transhumanism. The mutual prehension is like a mutual hybridization. The theory of extended mind by Andy Clark and David Chalmers witnesses this hybridization of human and machine. The future orientation of this hybridized world is totally up to us in the present, depending on how we understand and take steps to prepare for the future. However, our commonsensical and dyadic understandings of nature/culture, human/ nonhuman and living/nonliving become significant stumbling blocks on the road. This paper just tries to show how we, humans and machines together, are after all one, to sink or swim together. However, Clark’s idea of human beings as natural-born cyborgs still contains a modern error of anthropocentrism. Thus, a trans-human philosophy for new beings needs to be a philosophy in which all beings, living and nonliving, are equally prehended. This article argues that this is Whitehead philosophy of organism.

This paper argues for a reconceptualization of hybridity. Rejecting the definition of hybridity as a ‘cultural melange’ as ideological, it reconstructs the contradiction inherent to hybridity as a dialectical opposition, and then, following the dialectical materialism of Slavoj Žižek, this paper follows this opposition through its dialectical resolution. Consequently, the model of hybridity that claims the compatibility of local and global identity is resisted in preference to a form of negative hybridity that rejects the choice between local and global identity as false. This theoretical model is played out with reference to contemporary South Korean identity, using the tension between local Korean culture and an intruding global culture to explore the contradictions that hybridity tries to contain and the motivations that give rise to them.