The starting place for the papers in this special section is music. Music is not bound to materia... more The starting place for the papers in this special section is music. Music is not bound to material forms as is painting and sculpture or to language like literature and poetry. It travels as waves with kinetic energy through space. Music is governed by organizational principles, to be sure, but the porosity of its delivery and the purported universality of its form-no prior knowledge is required to experience it-makes music one of the most effective conveyors of human emotion. The study of Korean popular music has expanded substantially in recent years and has been informed by trends in two areas of scholarship. The first area is that of the "popular"; scholarship in this area has illuminated everyday life as a key site for critical engagement with mass media. 1 The other area can be broadly categorized as "K-pop studies"; this scholarship takes stock of popular culture in transnational forms that manifest in multimedia spectacles, global fandom, and mass performances. 2 These two groundswells have created a veritable golden age of popular culture studies, and have brought into relief the extent to which the
In the 1920s, colonial Korean children had different opportunities and materials to sing. Newly e... more In the 1920s, colonial Korean children had different opportunities and materials to sing. Newly established missionary schools adapted hymns for children, and the colonial schools run by the Japanese regime considered song time to be essential to children's emotional and intellectual development. It is from this diverse ecology of musical offerings that original Korean sung poems, or tongyo, emerged. Tongyo were short poems written by often prominent writers that were then set to music by Korean composers, many of whom studied Western music in Japan. Tongyo composers wrote works that, unlike Christian hymns (ch'ansongga) and Japanese school songs (changga), were written in the Korean language and were intended for Korean voices but were structured by what was then novel Western musical conventions. Through an analysis of tongyo by two seminal figures, Yun Kȗgyȏng and Chȏng Sunch'ȏl, this paper illuminates the musical grammar by which Yun and Chȏng reoriented the sensibilities of their young singers. This comparison reveals the challenges of fitting western tonalities to the Korean language, thereby questioning the prevalent assumption that tongyo were national forms whose value hinges on their effortless communication of authentic Korea emotions.
This chapter outlines the social, political, and economic conditions that enabled the emergence o... more This chapter outlines the social, political, and economic conditions that enabled the emergence of a print culture for young readers in colonial Korea. It historicizes this emergence globally and locally, against the backdrop of discourses on the role of youth that circulated among intellectuals and educators in Korea, Japan, and China. With the emergence of the modern political subject, youth came to embody the nation’s aspirations. The figure of the child that emerged a decade later contrasted with this early configuration of the political, non-adult youth. This chapter sets the stage for the book's argument: that children were celebrated as privileged protagonists of the future because, like youth, they were intellectually and emotionally unburdened by the past and ideally situated to build a modern nation. But unlike youth, the new children possessed a child-heart conducive to the colonial project of engineering a new, affectively privileged modern subject.
This chapter introduces one of the important contributions of children’s writers to Korean litera... more This chapter introduces one of the important contributions of children’s writers to Korean literary history, namely, their intervention in the debates on the “gap” between the spoken and written languages and the perceived inability of literature to capture and respond to the spirit of the people. While Kim Tong-in and Yi Kwang-su are largely credited with the development of a modern literary vernacular, this chapter shows that because of the conception of the affective nature of the child-heart as one that deserved both respect and appropriate content, Pang Chŏng-hwan developed techniques that were appropriate for the child-heart through his theories of and application of the craft of writing and folktale adaptations. This piece of linguistic and literary history gives a more comprehensive picture of how child-specific language began to play a role in the development of young readers’ print culture.
The child-heart became a salient concept in Japan and Korea in the 1920s, and in Korea it drove f... more The child-heart became a salient concept in Japan and Korea in the 1920s, and in Korea it drove fresh and diverse content in conjunction with the emerging visual turn in print media. This chapter explores the mechanisms of the child-heart concept that served as the foundation of children’s literature in Korea, and it argues that texts and images in children’s magazines worked together to create a natural and affectively privileged child. The concept of the child-heart made the child visible for the first time, and facilitated the building of a cultural literacy of text and image. At the same time, the manner in which it hinged on the relationship between child and nature reflected a certain degree of nostalgic yearning that coded future aspirations at a time when the colonization of Korea made such dreams uncertain at best.
This chapter examines literature for children at the height of imperialization (kōminka) policies... more This chapter examines literature for children at the height of imperialization (kōminka) policies in the late 1930s, the era considered most aggressive in its attempt to efface the Korean language and culture. The cultural production for children from this era is often referenced for its normalization of militarism, which is evident in the celebration of war in the texts and images of children’s culture. This chapter argues that this transition to the militarized child was facilitated by organic qualities so celebrated in earlier decades, which made the hearts and bodies of children susceptible to regulation and discipline. Still, humor, irony, and the celebration of the transformative power of the imagination served as a powerful counternarrative to the view of late colonial culture as foreclosed. This was the era that voiced some of colonial Korea’s most powerful anticapitalist resistance.
Abstract:The Construction of the Child in Korean Children's Magazines, 1908-1950 examines ... more Abstract:The Construction of the Child in Korean Children's Magazines, 1908-1950 examines the child as a site of ideological inscription through the texts and illustrations of children's magazines from 1908-1950. The analysis, which spans Korea's colonial and ...
This chapter turns to children’s literature at its most significant watershed moment: the liberat... more This chapter turns to children’s literature at its most significant watershed moment: the liberation of Korea from its thirty-five-year colonization. In the five years between 1945 and the Korean War in 1950, the Korean peninsula experienced the euphoria of liberation, the arrival of the United State Military Government in Korea, the hardening of ideological positions, and the ensuing mass migration up and down the peninsula, as well as the official establishment of two separate and mutually intolerant regimes. Children’s literature provides a fascinating counterpoint to these historical shifts by showcasing powerful nationalist tendencies that set the tone for a new beginning, while simultaneously presenting strong undercurrents remaining from the colonial past. Most significantly, this chapter looks at the much-celebrated and freshly liberated child-heart and questions the extent of liberation in light of a newly forged relationship between Korea’s new young citizens and their lib...
This chapter explores children’s literature during a time when new leftist visions demanded that ... more This chapter explores children’s literature during a time when new leftist visions demanded that content and form be merged to better capture the child-heart. Proletarian writers wrote against the bourgeois child-heart and translated it into a moral instinct and outrage over the exploitation of the working class. These writers, many of whom went on to become prominent literary figures in North Korea, sought to create a child-heart that, unlike the angelic disposition of its bourgeois counterpart, was fueled by resentment and choreographed action. Noting the transnational connections with proletarian cultures in Japan, the Soviet Union, and the United States, this chapter examines the content and language of leftist writing and points to emerging developments in children’s literature that spilled over into the formative period of 1950s North Korea, which became home to many of the prominent writers and illustrators active in the mid-twenties and thirties.
The atomic bombing marked an end to World War II and triggered the evacuation of the Japanese fro... more The atomic bombing marked an end to World War II and triggered the evacuation of the Japanese from the Korean peninsula. In its wake came parallel occupations by the USSR and the US, under which North and South Korea dedicated themselves to rebuilding from postwar destruction. Science and technology had a central role to play as the means through which to meet economic goals and achieve military, political, and social ideals. In North Korea, the investment in science and technology revealed itself in young reader magazines, where scientific content made banal the exceptional power of nuclear energy and made the natural world knowable through formulas and data. At the same time, science and fiction took an interest in the relationships between the self and the collective and between humans and nature and reconfigured these relationships in moral terms. This article argues that scientific knowledge had to be framed by, and injected with, strong moral guidance to assure accurate and ap...
This book is the story of the emergence and development of writing for children in modern Korea. ... more This book is the story of the emergence and development of writing for children in modern Korea. In the 1920s, a narrator-adult voice began to speak for the first time directly to a child-reader whose mind was deemed knowable and moldable. Writers and educators saw the qualities of this unique child audience manifest in a new concept called the child-heart, or tongsim. This book examines children’s literature at the moment the child emerged as a powerful metaphor of Korea’s future, through the colonization of Korea, and up until the ideological entrenchment that intensified in the post-liberation period. By reading children’s periodicals against the political, educational, and psychological discourses of their time, this book argues that the child-heart concept was particularly productive for the project of modernity and nation-building, as well as for the colonial and postcolonial projects of socialization and nationalization, because it posited the child in a symbiotic relationshi...
The starting place for the papers in this special section is music. Music is not bound to materia... more The starting place for the papers in this special section is music. Music is not bound to material forms as is painting and sculpture or to language like literature and poetry. It travels as waves with kinetic energy through space. Music is governed by organizational principles, to be sure, but the porosity of its delivery and the purported universality of its form-no prior knowledge is required to experience it-makes music one of the most effective conveyors of human emotion. The study of Korean popular music has expanded substantially in recent years and has been informed by trends in two areas of scholarship. The first area is that of the "popular"; scholarship in this area has illuminated everyday life as a key site for critical engagement with mass media. 1 The other area can be broadly categorized as "K-pop studies"; this scholarship takes stock of popular culture in transnational forms that manifest in multimedia spectacles, global fandom, and mass performances. 2 These two groundswells have created a veritable golden age of popular culture studies, and have brought into relief the extent to which the
In the 1920s, colonial Korean children had different opportunities and materials to sing. Newly e... more In the 1920s, colonial Korean children had different opportunities and materials to sing. Newly established missionary schools adapted hymns for children, and the colonial schools run by the Japanese regime considered song time to be essential to children's emotional and intellectual development. It is from this diverse ecology of musical offerings that original Korean sung poems, or tongyo, emerged. Tongyo were short poems written by often prominent writers that were then set to music by Korean composers, many of whom studied Western music in Japan. Tongyo composers wrote works that, unlike Christian hymns (ch'ansongga) and Japanese school songs (changga), were written in the Korean language and were intended for Korean voices but were structured by what was then novel Western musical conventions. Through an analysis of tongyo by two seminal figures, Yun Kȗgyȏng and Chȏng Sunch'ȏl, this paper illuminates the musical grammar by which Yun and Chȏng reoriented the sensibilities of their young singers. This comparison reveals the challenges of fitting western tonalities to the Korean language, thereby questioning the prevalent assumption that tongyo were national forms whose value hinges on their effortless communication of authentic Korea emotions.
This chapter outlines the social, political, and economic conditions that enabled the emergence o... more This chapter outlines the social, political, and economic conditions that enabled the emergence of a print culture for young readers in colonial Korea. It historicizes this emergence globally and locally, against the backdrop of discourses on the role of youth that circulated among intellectuals and educators in Korea, Japan, and China. With the emergence of the modern political subject, youth came to embody the nation’s aspirations. The figure of the child that emerged a decade later contrasted with this early configuration of the political, non-adult youth. This chapter sets the stage for the book's argument: that children were celebrated as privileged protagonists of the future because, like youth, they were intellectually and emotionally unburdened by the past and ideally situated to build a modern nation. But unlike youth, the new children possessed a child-heart conducive to the colonial project of engineering a new, affectively privileged modern subject.
This chapter introduces one of the important contributions of children’s writers to Korean litera... more This chapter introduces one of the important contributions of children’s writers to Korean literary history, namely, their intervention in the debates on the “gap” between the spoken and written languages and the perceived inability of literature to capture and respond to the spirit of the people. While Kim Tong-in and Yi Kwang-su are largely credited with the development of a modern literary vernacular, this chapter shows that because of the conception of the affective nature of the child-heart as one that deserved both respect and appropriate content, Pang Chŏng-hwan developed techniques that were appropriate for the child-heart through his theories of and application of the craft of writing and folktale adaptations. This piece of linguistic and literary history gives a more comprehensive picture of how child-specific language began to play a role in the development of young readers’ print culture.
The child-heart became a salient concept in Japan and Korea in the 1920s, and in Korea it drove f... more The child-heart became a salient concept in Japan and Korea in the 1920s, and in Korea it drove fresh and diverse content in conjunction with the emerging visual turn in print media. This chapter explores the mechanisms of the child-heart concept that served as the foundation of children’s literature in Korea, and it argues that texts and images in children’s magazines worked together to create a natural and affectively privileged child. The concept of the child-heart made the child visible for the first time, and facilitated the building of a cultural literacy of text and image. At the same time, the manner in which it hinged on the relationship between child and nature reflected a certain degree of nostalgic yearning that coded future aspirations at a time when the colonization of Korea made such dreams uncertain at best.
This chapter examines literature for children at the height of imperialization (kōminka) policies... more This chapter examines literature for children at the height of imperialization (kōminka) policies in the late 1930s, the era considered most aggressive in its attempt to efface the Korean language and culture. The cultural production for children from this era is often referenced for its normalization of militarism, which is evident in the celebration of war in the texts and images of children’s culture. This chapter argues that this transition to the militarized child was facilitated by organic qualities so celebrated in earlier decades, which made the hearts and bodies of children susceptible to regulation and discipline. Still, humor, irony, and the celebration of the transformative power of the imagination served as a powerful counternarrative to the view of late colonial culture as foreclosed. This was the era that voiced some of colonial Korea’s most powerful anticapitalist resistance.
Abstract:The Construction of the Child in Korean Children's Magazines, 1908-1950 examines ... more Abstract:The Construction of the Child in Korean Children's Magazines, 1908-1950 examines the child as a site of ideological inscription through the texts and illustrations of children's magazines from 1908-1950. The analysis, which spans Korea's colonial and ...
This chapter turns to children’s literature at its most significant watershed moment: the liberat... more This chapter turns to children’s literature at its most significant watershed moment: the liberation of Korea from its thirty-five-year colonization. In the five years between 1945 and the Korean War in 1950, the Korean peninsula experienced the euphoria of liberation, the arrival of the United State Military Government in Korea, the hardening of ideological positions, and the ensuing mass migration up and down the peninsula, as well as the official establishment of two separate and mutually intolerant regimes. Children’s literature provides a fascinating counterpoint to these historical shifts by showcasing powerful nationalist tendencies that set the tone for a new beginning, while simultaneously presenting strong undercurrents remaining from the colonial past. Most significantly, this chapter looks at the much-celebrated and freshly liberated child-heart and questions the extent of liberation in light of a newly forged relationship between Korea’s new young citizens and their lib...
This chapter explores children’s literature during a time when new leftist visions demanded that ... more This chapter explores children’s literature during a time when new leftist visions demanded that content and form be merged to better capture the child-heart. Proletarian writers wrote against the bourgeois child-heart and translated it into a moral instinct and outrage over the exploitation of the working class. These writers, many of whom went on to become prominent literary figures in North Korea, sought to create a child-heart that, unlike the angelic disposition of its bourgeois counterpart, was fueled by resentment and choreographed action. Noting the transnational connections with proletarian cultures in Japan, the Soviet Union, and the United States, this chapter examines the content and language of leftist writing and points to emerging developments in children’s literature that spilled over into the formative period of 1950s North Korea, which became home to many of the prominent writers and illustrators active in the mid-twenties and thirties.
The atomic bombing marked an end to World War II and triggered the evacuation of the Japanese fro... more The atomic bombing marked an end to World War II and triggered the evacuation of the Japanese from the Korean peninsula. In its wake came parallel occupations by the USSR and the US, under which North and South Korea dedicated themselves to rebuilding from postwar destruction. Science and technology had a central role to play as the means through which to meet economic goals and achieve military, political, and social ideals. In North Korea, the investment in science and technology revealed itself in young reader magazines, where scientific content made banal the exceptional power of nuclear energy and made the natural world knowable through formulas and data. At the same time, science and fiction took an interest in the relationships between the self and the collective and between humans and nature and reconfigured these relationships in moral terms. This article argues that scientific knowledge had to be framed by, and injected with, strong moral guidance to assure accurate and ap...
This book is the story of the emergence and development of writing for children in modern Korea. ... more This book is the story of the emergence and development of writing for children in modern Korea. In the 1920s, a narrator-adult voice began to speak for the first time directly to a child-reader whose mind was deemed knowable and moldable. Writers and educators saw the qualities of this unique child audience manifest in a new concept called the child-heart, or tongsim. This book examines children’s literature at the moment the child emerged as a powerful metaphor of Korea’s future, through the colonization of Korea, and up until the ideological entrenchment that intensified in the post-liberation period. By reading children’s periodicals against the political, educational, and psychological discourses of their time, this book argues that the child-heart concept was particularly productive for the project of modernity and nation-building, as well as for the colonial and postcolonial projects of socialization and nationalization, because it posited the child in a symbiotic relationshi...
Science fiction narratives appeared in the North Korean children's magazine Adong munhak betw... more Science fiction narratives appeared in the North Korean children's magazine Adong munhak between 1956 and 1965, and they bear witness to the significant Soviet influence in this formative period of the DPRK. Moving beyond questions of authenticity and imitation, however, this article locates the science fiction narrative within North Korean discourses on children's literature preoccupied with the role of fiction as both a reflection of the real and a projection of the imminent, utopian future. Through a close reading of science fiction narratives from this period, this article underscores the way in which science, technology, and the environment are implicated in North Korean political discourses of development, and points to the way in which these works resolve the inherent tension between the desirable and seemingly contradictory qualities of the ideal scientist—obedient servant of the collective and indefatigable questioner—to establish the child-scientist as the new prot...
... DAFNA ZUR[ Ph.D. candidate in Korean literature at the University of British Columbia ]. 목차 1... more ... DAFNA ZUR[ Ph.D. candidate in Korean literature at the University of British Columbia ]. 목차 1. Pager 2. Pagee 3. No Page. 더보기. 초록. 더보기. Visionaries dream about reality. Believe me, reality is what visionaries dream about. ...
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