Jiwon Shin (Yale Postdoctoral Fellow/UC Berkeley)
| DATE: | Friday, April 25, 2003 |
|---|---|
| TIME: | 4:00-6:00 p.m. |
| PLACE: | IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton St., 6th Floor |
| FORMAT: | Colloquium |
| SPONSOR: | Center for Korean Studies |
Late Choson informal prose (including "random jottings," informal letters, prefaces and colophons, and various accounts on travels, objects, and people) is commonly characterized as personal, due mostly to its spontaneous and casual mode of presenting its subject matter. Informal prose as personal writing also signifies two seemingly incompatible literary presentations of the self: writing about the self, which at the same time effaces the self. This unique self-presentation suggests that being "personal" in regard to informal prose means not how the texts might describe a person, but how the texts function like a map, in which knowledge about a person is charted. My discussion concerns the spatial notion of what it means for writing to be "personal" with a focus on two seemingly different writers, Pak Chi-won and Cho Hui-ryong, of the late eighteenth century and nineteenth century, respectively. I address the ways in which informal prose writing might help us chronicle the manner of knowing about a person and a unique understanding of space generated by that "personal" knowledge, as they shift from the late eighteenth through the late nineteenth century.
Jiwon Shin received her PhD from Harvard University, and is currently a fellow at the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University. In the fall of 2003, she will be joining Berkeley's Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures as assistant professor teaching Korean literature. She has also taught at Dartmouth College and Bowdoin College as a visiting lecturer. Her main research interests include: late traditional and early modern Korean poetry and informal prose; cartographic writing; and visual culture. She has received the Daesan Foundation Grant for co-translating poetry of Pak Chae-sam with David R. McCann, and the Korea Literature Translation Institute Grant for translating poetry and essays of Kim Hye-sun.
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
