When the future disappears : the modernist imagination in late colonial Korea / Janet Poole.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Poole, Janet, author.

Series:

Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University.

Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Language and languages in literature.

Postcolonialism in literature.

Colonialism in literature.

Modernism (Literature)--Korea.

Modernism (Literature).

Korean literature--20th century--History and criticism.

Korean literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (301 p.)

Place of Publication:

New York ; Chichester, England : Columbia University Press, 2014.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Taking a panoramic view of Korea's dynamic literary production in the final decade of Japanese rule, When the Future Disappears locates the imprint of a new temporal sense in Korean modernism: the impression of time interrupted, with no promise of a future. As colonial subjects of an empire headed toward total war, Korean writers in this global fascist moment produced some of the most sophisticated writings of twentieth-century modernism. Yi T'aejun, Ch'oe Myongik, Im Hwa, So Insik, Ch'oe Chaeso, Pak T'aewon, Kim Namch'on, and O Changhwan, among other Korean writers, lived through a rare colonial history in which their vernacular language was first inducted into the modern, only to be shut out again through the violence of state power. The colonial suppression of Korean-language publications was an effort to mobilize toward war, and it forced Korean writers to face the loss of their letters and devise new, creative forms of expression. Their remarkable struggle reflects the stark foreclosure at the heart of the modern colonial experience. Straddling cultural, intellectual, and literary history, this book maps the different strategies, including abstraction, irony, paradox, and even silence, that Korean writers used to narrate life within the Japanese empire.

Contents:

Front matter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction : The Disappearing Future of Colonial Fascism

1. The Unruly Detail of Late Colonialism

2. The Sociology of Colonial Nostalgia

3 . A Private Orient

4 . Peri-urban Dreams

5. Imperialization, or the Resolution of Crisis

6 . Taking Possession of the Emperor's Language

Epilogue: Afterlives

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9780231538558

0231538553

OCLC:

893708440