FLAS Korean Language Fellows

I’m a professor of English literature, but I’m writing this now from the campus of Yonsei University in Seoul.  A few years ago, I could never have dreamed I would end up here, given my interest in the influence of the philosophy of mathematics on Victorian literature.  During the COVID lockdown I had begun studying the Korean language as a hobby, fascinated by its distinctive affordances for poetry.  But Professor Jeon and the CCKS encouraged me to think further about what had begun as a peripheral interest, introducing me to people working in Korean studies both at UCI and in Seoul.  From a website curated by Professor Hyungji Park of Yonsei University I first learned about Percival Lowell’s Land of the Morning Calm--an account of his 3-month sojourn in Korea during 1883-4—and Professor Park’s examination of imperialist narratives in the Korean context and in relation to visual media led me to think about the implications of the fact that this book was illustrated with photographs.  Since the publication of Edward Saïd’s Orientalism, the notion that the Western conception of “the Orient” serves a program of Western self-idealization has been a commonplace: for Saïd, the Oriental “Other” is defined by the West as lesser even as it serves as its mirror image.  But Percival Lowell’s writings on Asia are shaped by a very particular kind of mirror metaphor, one that’s specific to the American perception of East Asian culture in the late nineteenth century: what the Victorians called the “magic mirror” of photography. 

The special qualities of this mirror are on full display in Lowell’s book.  During the nineteenth century, photography was bound up with new accounts of knowledge and the physical world, and Lowell belongs to the lineage of art photographers who understood the “realism” of photography to be grounded, not in its fidelity to detail, but in its revelation of structural, and typically oppositional, relationships.  For the oppositional logic of the photograph—black / white, negative / positive—accorded precisely with the claims of contemporary physicists that the physical world could best be understood not in terms of distinctions between kinds of matter but in terms of the fundamental structures and polarities that gave matter its properties.  Lowell uses this formal logic to frame his relationship to Korea as one of mutual definition, in much the same way as the positive and negative poles of a magnet take their meaning from each other; Lowell’s Korea was thus at once “a mirror to our own civilization” and “a photographic negative of our own civilization.” 

The more I studied Lowell and other promulgators of information about East Asia, the more I came to see that the significance of his work is not confined to its imposition of the language of physics and photography onto Korean culture.  Even as he embraced the abstractly structural as the highest kind of knowledge and described Korea in terms of a simplified positive/negative framework, Lowell’s account of Korean art reveals that for him the deep appeal of Korean culture lay precisely in its capacity to reconcretize and revitalize the very abstractions that guided his work. For he understood Korean art to work with rather than against the grain of scientific abstraction: in Korea, he argued, even mathematical formulae are rendered as poems.  At this moment of the division of the “two cultures” of art and science in the West, the great virtue of what Lowell would ultimately call the “Soul of the Far East” was its devotion to their synthesis.  This account of East Asian culture would facilitate its use as an ideological resource in European modernist art, from the imagist poetry of Lowell’s sister Amy to Ezra Pound’s Cantos.

Professor Park generously agreed to be my host at Yonsei, and I now find myself on a Fulbright fellowship here, teaching a graduate class, doing research, and having fascinating discussions with Professor Park and other local scholars.  Every day brings something new, not only in conversations with faculty and students at Yonsei but also in this extraordinary city, where I can spend the morning hiking Ansan, the afternoon writing in a café overlooking the Han, and the evening reading on the Cheonggyecheon stream by lamplight.

Three problems motivate my research: the accurate articulation of the forces that compose empires, the contemporaneous response of fiction to these forces, and the literary imagination of alternative futures beyond imperialism. I explore these problems in my dissertation, The Fourth Way Literary Imagination: Alternative Foci and the Entangled Matrix of Colonial Japanese-language Literature, 1930-1945. In this study, I read the Japanese-language fiction of two Korean authors, Kim Sa-ryang and Ch’oe Chŏng-hŭi, and one Taiwanese author, Long Ying-zong, for their literary imagination of a fourth way beyond the multilateral matrix of Japanese imperialism, Western modernity, and colonial nationalism. I use Laura Doyle’s concept of inter-imperiality, which highlights the enmeshment and mutual constitution of global empires, to articulate this matrix, and take inspiration for the term “fourth way literary imagination” from non-alignment and third way politics. These latter ideas emerged from the Bandung Conference, which was a 1955 gathering of 29 independent and decolonizing Asian and African nations who strategized to avoid conscription to either Soviet communism or American neoliberalism. Like these postwar writers, Kim, Ch’oe, and Long illuminated the entanglement of imperial, capitalist, and nationalist forces in their fiction and looked beyond empire toward alternative futures. In order to address these intersecting political formations, I investigate Kim, Ch’oe, and Long’s use of three topoi, national enlightenment, the transformation of bourgeois domesticity under fascism, and colonial social mobility, respectively, to open up a literary fourth space.

This project has been a long time in the making. My training is primarily in Japanese Studies and Comparative Literature, but when I arrived at UCI, I started taking Korean because I knew I wanted to write something about the Korean author Kim Sa-ryang, who I had encountered in my MA program at UCR. Even though I mostly work with Kim’s Japanese-language writings, I felt I couldn’t do this responsibly without Korean language competency, so I took the full Korean langauge series here at UCI, and then did a summer intensive Korean language program at Middlebury College. During my years building my Korean skills, I read more colonial Korean authors, such as Ch’oe Chŏng-hŭi and Im Hwa, who were contemporaries with Kim Sa-ryang and became increasingly interested in their articulation of empire as a global system, rather than just their thinking on the oppressive actions of the Japanese Empire. I think several Korean writers under Japanese colonialism were keenly aware that they were dealing with an interlocking matrix of forces, and not just one hegemonic power. While on a Fulbright Hays Fellowship in Japan (2022-2023), I had the privelege of meeting several Japanese scholars of Korean literature in Tokyo, as well as Korean scholars of colonial period literature. I was also able to travel to Korea for the first time, which was formative for both my scholarly network and research. I am extremely grateful to have received a FLAS fellowship from the Center for Critical Korean Studies this year so I can keep working on my dissertation here at UCI.

My research situates Asian American studies within a global context, examining the intersections and overlaps between Korean America and Korea through the lens of crime fiction. My dissertation argues that analyzing Korean American and Korean crime fiction together reveals how crimes that appear localized in space and time are deeply connected to global forms of violence, including war, empire, and capitalism. By focusing on crimes such as terrorism, sexual violence and exploitation, fraud, and betrayal depicted in literary texts, I explore how each crime manifests the complex entanglements between local contexts, the state, the global forces, including racialization, knowledge production, Japanese colonialism, U.S. imperialism, East Asian subimperialism, and the crisis of finance capitalism. Building on my dissertation, my future research will examine Korean horror cinema, particularly the transformation of female characters into non-human figures such as vampires, creatures, zombies, monsters, and ghosts in the era of postdevelopment and deindustrialization, analyzing the genre’s transnational and global significance.

Growing up as a Korean-American, I struggled to communicate fluently in Korean and was often stuck attempting to piece together broken sentences. In eighth grade, I moved to Seoul for a year to pursue my competitive gymnastics career, leading me to attend a traditional Korean middle school. Immersed in the language daily, I progressed from barely spelling "Hello" to approaching near-native fluency. My assimilation eventually led me to become an embodiment of the hyphen between Korean-American, an in-between state where I could navigate between both cultures on profound levels of understanding. As I returned to America, I never fully let go of this newfound identity, and I realized that my future career would be set where I could bridge these two worlds. Today, my studies at UCI focus on East Asian Cultures and Art History, where I aim to understand the evolution of modern and contemporary Korean art alongside the influence of the Western “Other” within its history. I plan to pursue a career path in curatorial studies, hoping to work in art institutions that bring recognition to the complex history of Korea and its artistry. 

I became interested in Korean due to my passion for East Asian cultures and dynamics. As a Filipino-Chinese immigrant, I constantly found intersections between my upbringing and the culture of those around me. While at UCI, the language requirements for my International Studies and Asian American studies majors presented me the opportunity to be able to experience these dynamics through the native tongue of a culture. Having been interested in Korean artistry by groups such as DPR and South Korea's stance on multicultural influence, I chose to pursue Korean as my language. In the future, I want to work either in the educational sector or in policy to create more awareness and avenues for Asian-American youth, especially in doctoral, research, and cultural fields.

I became interested in Korean in my second year of high school. I had always had a fascination with linguistics ever since I was little (I was always bothering my mom to teach me words in Bisaya) and it being the pandemic at the time I had decided to start learning a new language. I wanted to study Korean because Hangul was relatively easy to learn and I found out that the grammar was similar to Spanish which I was familiar with because ofschool. As I learned more through self study I fell in love with the language and history of Korea and decided that I wanted to pursue this area of study in college. In the future I would want to be a translator and possibly learn more languages. 

I started learning Korean in 2018 after being fascinated by the effects that the Hallyu wave had in the United States. During the pandemic, I would also continue my research into the Hallyu wave, specifically interested in how companies advertise Korean media to fulfill the demand of media consumption. Once I transferred to UCI, I was able to take more classes that touch upon significant pieces of media (film, literature, etc) which show up frequently in advertisements and marketing today. I am working towards a career in International communications and marketing, in particular internet multimedia.