2015, Vol.8, No.3

탈경계인문학Trans-Humanities 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.57

pISSN : 2092-6081 / eISSN : 2383-9899
https://journal.kci.go.kr/eih

This article examines the coverage of the Korean War in the popular American magazine Life, focusing on its depiction of Koreans. In these depictions, Koreans figure as an epistemological enigma: as ambiguously friendly/hostile, loyal/disloyal, and as worthy/unworthy of life. But in journalism’s attempted management of that inscrutability we glimpse a crucial element of the shift in epistemes that defined the emergence of what cultural theorist Rey Chow has described as the Age of the World Target: an epoch in which the “countries of East Asia, Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East took on the significance of ‘target fields’ — as fields of information retrieval and dissemination that were necessary to the United States’ continual political and ideological hegemony.” To understand this emergent episteme, however, it is also necessary to engage with the work of cultural critic Christina Klein, who has described the post-1945 period as one in which middlebrow cultural works like Life reveal a U.S. Cold War ideology oriented as much by a desire to integrate subjects of the decolonizing world into the American sphere of influence as by an impulse to contain the Soviet menace.

In contrast to the United States or Great Britain, Germany is known as a country in which private and sexual behaviour of politicians was and is seldom published. This article, which is based on broad research of newspaper and archival sources, shows how the rise of the mass press since the 1880s led to an increase in sex scandals in imperial Germany, too, although censorship and the control of the press were still quite strict. Such reports about private matters provoked intense debates in different public spheres — such as parliaments, pubs, and courtrooms. Scandals about adultery, homosexuality, and sexual relations with women in colonies in Africa called public norms into questions. This way, media created a new kind of public knowledge about sexuality. The process by which political and public spheres changed is clearly linked to press campaigns. While private questions became more political, politicians presented themselves in a more private context in order to win back trust. However, many scandals were not initiated by tabloids but by political papers or by leading politicians themselves. Therefore, this article points out a change in the political communication due to the rise of the mass press and the increased political competition. In many cases, especially concerning adultery, the reactions were surprisingly tolerant and at least liberal and social democratic papers partly accepted homosexual conduct, while forced relations with African women were no longer tolerated. At the same time, these campaigns succeeded in attacking the conservative elite’s reputation and politics — such as those of the Emperor and his aristocratic advisors as well as of famous colonialists and leading politicians.

This paper offers an analysis of Yano Ryūkei’s political novel Sēbe Meishi Keikoku Bidan (Illustrious Statesman of Thebes, 1883–1884). This best-selling text, which was set in ancient Thebes and strove to represent the possibilities of political transformation espoused by the People’s Rights Movement, was also a striking demonstration of the possibilities of shorthand for re-conceptualizing the relations of political thought and literature. Yano employed a mixed style based on classical Japanese grammar, for which enlisted the participation of two shorthand reporters to transcribe the two volumes of the text. Although his novel was unable to become a template for the mainstream of modern Japanese, it is precisely here and in Yano’s later writings on language and script reform that the phonetic foundations of the Meiji episteme come more clearly into focus. Accordingly, it is my primary aim to explore Yano’s advocacy of shorthand and its contributions to the transformation of modern Japanese literature, language, and script. However, I also wish to gesture toward some of the broader shifts toward phonetics that spread to China and Korea by the 1890s that are indicative of a regional shift in the relationship to Chinese literacy.