WHEN THE FUTURE DISAPPEARS: THE MODERNIST IMAGINATION IN LATE COLONIAL KOREA 2015 msa book prize winner
Professor Janet Poole has been awarded the 2015 Modernist Studies Association’s Annual Book Prize for her recent publication, When the Future Disappears: The Modernist Imagination in Late Colonial Korea. This book prize is awarded annually to the most significant contribution to modernist studies, and Professor Poole’s book was selected among a distinguished group of five authors on this year’s book prize short list. The Centre for the Study of Korea wholeheartedly congratulates Professor Poole for this outstanding achievement .
Below is the 2015 MSA Book Prize Committee’s assessment of the tremendous scholarly significance and research contribution of When the Future Disappears.
“When the Future Disappears is both a remarkable work of literary history and a groundbreaking meditation on modernisms across temporal and political regimes and transnational contexts. Poole accounts with striking range and fluency for the complex field of literary production in Korea during the final decade of its colonial occupation by Japan. In that fraught moment, she argues, a distinctive but broadly consequential modernism took shape. Faced with the colonial suppression of their native language and state control of publication and literary institutions, Korean writers were compelled to represent the loss of their language, their past, and their sense of the future, mobilizing modes of irony, paradox, abstraction, and silence to represent the lived experience of being and becoming modern as colonial subjects of Japan. Even for readers with no knowledge of Korean language or literature, Poole’s readings of key texts and figures makes a richly detailed case that Korea’s literary project, taking shape in the moment of global fascism, offers some of the most ambitious and provocative works of twentieth-century modernism across the globe. Her analysis not only creates a powerful framework for constituting Korean modernism as such. It repeatedly moves through Anglo-European modernism, and takes on the broader problem of accounting for temporal rupture, state violence, and the experience of colonization as generative conditions of cultural production. Deftly braiding literary history and textual readings with cultural and intellectual history, Poole has produced a work that models new, bracing possibilities for global and transnational modernist study, and for bold rethinking of the paradigms that shape our account of the relationship between aesthetic and political forms.”
To see more details on this year’s MSA Book Prize visit: https://msa.press.jhu.edu/prize/
On February 6, 2015, the Centre for the Study of Korea published an interview with Professor Poole by undergraduate student Katie Wang. To read this interview visit: https://munkschool.utoronto.ca/csk/research-articles/connecting-how-the-disappearing-future-turns-into-an-exploration-of-different-pasts-an-interview-with-janet-poole-on-her-new-book/
