Janet Poole, “A New World?: Midcentury Modernisms on the Korean Peninsula”
We have invited Professor Janet Poole, the 2015 Modernist Studies Association Book Prize Winner, from the University of Toronto to give a very special lecture at APEA. A summary of the talk can be found below. Please note the unusual meeting time.
This talk takes an exploratory look at two writers—Yi T’aejun and Ch’oe Myŏngik—and their work from the late colonial and early post-Liberation periods. Acknowledged as masterly modernists during the colonial era, their work from the late 1940s is usually understood as having regressed under the influence of the North Korean society to which they moved (in the case of Yi) or stayed (Ch’oe) as the peninsula was partitioned by competing states. But can we think of their work through the era of the Asia-Pacific and Korean Wars as forming part of an ongoing modernist project?
There will be no pre-distributed paper for this talk. If you have concerns about accessibility, please contact David Krolikoski at davidkroli at uchicago.edu or Brian White at bmwhite at uchicago.edu.