- P-ISSN0023-3900
- E-ISSN2733-9343
- A&HCI, SCOPUS, KCI
Vol.61 No.3
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It has been sixty years since English-language journals in Korean Studies began to be published in Korea. During this time span, Korean academic circles and journals have undergone various changes, which resulted in the transformation of both the journals and their surrounding environment. With due consideration of these changes, this paper attempts to investigate the significance and agendas of English-language journals in Korean Studies. First, it investigates why Korean intellectuals felt the need to learn English during the modern transitional period by examining the case of Yu Gil-jun. It then examines the initial goals of Englishlanguage magazines and journals in Korea. In the early phase, these publications tended to deliver one-way statements, almost sounding like publicity pitches, but they gradually took on the facade of an arena of scholarly discussion and output. The now defunct Pictorial Korea began publication following national liberation to inform the world about Korea by using photographs accompanied by brief texts. Korea Journal, which began publication immediately following the May 16 Coup (1961) for the prospective readership of overseas Koreans as well as foreigners, has transformed itself multiple times over the years and acquired the characteristics of a specialized academic journal. Seoul Journal of Korean Studies, which began publication following the 1988 Seoul Summer Olympics, initially took the approach of transmitting to the world research outcomes in Korean Studies in Korea. English-language journals published in Korea are expected to play a role in the advancement of Korean scholarship. This is because they can serve as a sphere of symbiosis and debate between Korean Studies inside and outside Korea. It is particularly hoped the journals will contribute to complementing or overcoming the closedness of the disciplinary system of the Korean academy.
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For the last several decades, people around the world have become increasingly interested in Korean economy and society. Along with this demand factor, the supply factor, that is, the eagerness of Korean scholars to actively interact with global academia, has encouraged Korean scholars to write more articles about the Korean economy in English. The combination of these two factors has over the last two to three decades resulted in the growth of English-language papers dealing with Korean subjects. However, the increase in English-language papers examining Korean subjects over the last two decades is largely explained by the overall growth of English-language papers in general, while the ratio of Koreanrelated subjects among those English-language publications has actually declined. More analyses should be made to understand this pattern. However, if we consider policy measures to improve the situation, it is reasonable first to think about how to enhance the availability or quality of data used for research on Korea. Even without allocating more money, the Korean government can attract scholars to study Korean subjects by making existing government data more available to scholars. Since the government is the largest data holder, a more forward-looking approach by the government can attract more scholars to study Korean subjects and to write more papers in English.
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In the English-speaking world, the history of Joseon is underrepresented on library shelves displaying books on East Asian history. Academic works in English on early modern Chinese and Japanese history greatly outnumber academic studies of Joseon. Moreover, even within the field of Joseon history, much more attention has been paid to political history and the history of war than to most other areas. Several studies of Joseon-era religion and philosophy, especially Confucianism, have also been published. However, only a small part of the scholarship on Joseon produced by scholars in the West deals with social or economic history. There is even less published on the history of science, medicine, and technology. Similarly, few monographs have been published that focus on Joseon’s cultural history. This lack of breadth in English-language scholarship may be the reason there is as yet no comprehensive one-volume survey of Joseon history, and why there are not as many books on Joseon in libraries as there should be. Fortunately, there are signs that the scholarship on Joseon is starting to multiply and diversify. That gives us hope that, in that nottoo-distant future, Joseon may be able to claim the space it deserves on library shelves.
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How does North Korea become visible and legible to us? What seems like propaganda and what seems like the real North Korea, and why? After more than 70 years of hostility it is an understatement to say that disrespect is deeply entrenched on both sides of the DMZ. Nonetheless, since the end of the Cold War in Europe and the cultural turn in Cold War Studies, scholarship on North Korea has become much more interesting. The monographs and articles examined here shed light on North Korea, but also speak to broader questions about human rights and hegemonic politics, visuality and capitalism, revolution and modernity, work and ideology, and the ethical framework for ending civil wars. In what is referred to here as critical scholarship on North Korea, we catch a glimpse of divergent postCold War currents and logic, with some shared commitment to look back, and to look again, from a position of proximity.
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At first glance, it seems that the relation between the study of Korean Buddhism within Korea and outside it can be characterized by the metaphor of osmosis: while Korean research freely travels to other academic communities that cite, critique, or otherwise engage it, Western scholarship on Korean Buddhism rarely receives any mention in Korean scholarship. Differing research agendas, linguistic barriers, and cultural assumptions can be identified as stumbling blocks, together with incompatible terminology. However, looking at the bigger picture, it is unmistakable that research agendas are growing increasingly closer. This article will attempt to briefly chart the intertwined histories of academic research on Korean Buddhism in Korea and in the West, identify the hurdles to meaningful exchange in both directions, and formulate some strategies for closing the gaps that separate academic communities.
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This article presents a critical overview on how the formal and aesthetic variations of the Korean documentary cinema in the twenty-first century have differed from and simultaneously renewed the activist, cinéma-vérité tradition of Korean independent documentaries of the 1980s and 1990s. These variations encompass personal documentaries and essay films, experimental documentaries on landscapes, documentaries extensively using archival materials, digitally enabled documentaries, and intersections of documentary and contemporary art. Mapping these variations onto five categories, I use the term “post-verité” to theorize these new constellations of aesthetics and politics. By departing from the epistemological and aesthetic assumptions of its predecessor, the Korean documentary in the twenty-first century has formed the most vibrant screenscape for cinematic experimentations. At the same time, I argue that these experimentations have also updated the activist tradition’s political and ethical commitment to history and politics by reinventing the ways of engaging with the traumas of modernization and the new problems of neoliberalized contemporary Korea.
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This paper examines the permutations of ethical norms within the “good” mother- figure in Bong Joon-ho’s Mother (2009) in relation to South Korea’s historical relationship with redemption. As a symptom of anxiety that stems from a particularly oppressive modern history of political subordination, civil division, and economic struggle, South Korea has exhibited a pattern of retrospection—repetitions of communal overcoming and remembering— to combat national “failures” and redeem national sovereignty. Similarly, the “good” mother’s condition of possibility is maintained by a recurrent loop of responsibility that obligates not only perpetual selflessness, but also neverending guilt. Considering the “good” mother’s entrenchment in the parameters of nationhood, the film becomes an ideal site to interrogate the formation and viability of her sacrificial and redemptive moral framework. Looking beyond defining maternal identity within the scope of the national and historical, the film offers an opportunity to investigate how, reversely, this “retrospective” identity may also work to outline, or limit, the conditions of her ethical conscience. Bringing to the fore the “good” mother’s affective dependency within guilt and the subsequent moral twists, the paper presents the possibility of breaking from the totalizing nature of her self-sacrifice.
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