Original scientific paper
Korean Literature as World-Literature. About Contemporary Korean Prose Literature and its Strategies In Translational Contexts
Boris Škvorc
; Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, University of Split
Abstract
This article provides and overview of contemporary Korean novels, films and tv series in a context of producing the national literature as world-literature. It discusses the problems of centre and periphery, border-spaces and their inclusion and exclusion from the literature as world-system. Korean prose literature is discussed in its national context, but also in the context of transcreation in other languages. In that respect the topics of translation and transcreation are discussed providing some examples, predominantly from postmodern Korean, and also from Croatian literature. The central question is the one already posed by Damrosch (2009): how to „learn” to read the works that have been trans-created in other languages and discursive environments? In posing that question, the issues of Moretti’s concepts of distant and close reading are considered as a possible methodological standpoint for cross-cultural interpretative process. The „case” of Korean literature is discussed in three parts: literature before 1980’s; the major writers of 1990’s and 2000’s (Hwang Sok-yong and Kim Young-ha) and the female „wave” during 2010’s, starting with Krys Lee and Euny Hong and concluding with Han Kang and Kim Ju-young. In conclusion the complex relationship between Hullya (the Korean Wave), with K-pop, tv series and contemporary film industry in its centre, is compared with current trends in Korean literature. That especially goes for literature that has in mind possible international readership. The focus is on how these genres situate themselves for possible reading/interpreting in a displaced environment of other space and hegemonic order where knowledge about discursive tactics of artefacts narrated (being that film, novel or tv series) is limited or, sometimes, deceiving. Finally, possible answers in articles that follow in this thematic block are suggested.
Keywords
contemporary Korean literature; film and TV series; world-literature system; novels; translation and transcreation; cross-cultural research; unifying corpus; uneven development; close and distant reading
Hrčak ID:
278147
URI
Publication date:
27.5.2022.
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