| Date | Time | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Friday, March 28, 2008 | 2:00PM - 4:00PM | Seminar Room 208N, Munk Centre For International Studies 1 Devonshire Place |
Yi Gwangsu’s Jaesaeng (Rebirth) was one of the most popular novels in colonial Korea during the 1920s. One reason for its popularity was that it was a romance novel set against the backdrop of the March First Movement Jaesaeng was also one of the first full-length novels to feature the “new woman” and her more commodified and eroticized counterpart, the “modern girl.” The “modern girl” was an embodiment of the excesses of modernity; in particular, the crass materialism and the craze for romance that overwhelmed Korean society after 1919. By depicting the fall of a “new woman” into a “modern girl,” the novel made a critique of modern life in Joseon. Because of its melodramatic aspects, Jaesaeng has been relatively ignored by literary critics. This talk will discuss how the novel was not simply escapist entertainment and contains insights both into shifts in capitalism at the time and into the narration of the nation.
Michael D. Shin is an assistant professor in the Department of Asian Studies at Cornell University. He is the co-editor, with Pang Kie-chung, of Landlords, Peasants, Intellectuals in Modern Korea (Cornell East Asia Series, 2005) and the translation editor of The Dynamics of Confucianism and Modernization in Korean History by Yi Tae-jin (Cornell East Asia Series, 2008). His research focuses on the colonial period, and he is preparing a book manuscript tentatively titled The Specter of Yi Gwangsu. He is also one of the editors of the journal Yeoksa Bipyeong.
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