Impossible Speech

The Politics of Representation in Contemporary Korean Literature and Film
Erscheinungsjahr 2024
ISBN: 978-0-231-20849-9
Verlag: Columbia University Press

Buch, Englisch, 240 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 150 mm x 226 mm, Gewicht: 366 g

In what ways can or should art engage with its social context? Authors, readers, and critics have been preoccupied with this question since the dawn of modern literature in Korea. Advocates of social engagement have typically focused on realist texts, seeing such works as best suited to represent injustices and inequalities by describing them as if they were before our very eyes.

Christopher P. Hanscom questions this understanding of political art by examining four figures central to recent Korean fiction, film, and public discourse: the migrant laborer, the witness to or survivor of state violence, the refugee, and the socially excluded urban precariat. Instead of making these marginalized figures intelligible to common sense, this book reveals the capacity of art to address the “impossible speech” of those who are not asked, expected, or allowed to put forward their thoughts, yet who in so doing expand the limits of the possible.

Impossible Speech proposes a new approach to literature and film that foregrounds ostensibly “nonpolitical” or nonsensical moments, challenging assumptions about the relationship between politics and art that locate the “politics” of the work in the representation of content understood in advance as being political. Recasting the political as a struggle over the possibility or impossibility of speech itself, this book finds the politics of a work of art in its power to confront the boundaries of what is sayable.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hanscom, Christopher

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Theater- und Filmwissenschaft | Andere Darstellende Künste Filmwissenschaft, Fernsehen, Radio Filmgeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturen sonstiger Sprachräume Ost- & Südostasiatische Literatur
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Strömungen & Epochen

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Impossible Speech and the Politics of Literature
1. The Return of the Real in South Korean Fiction
2. Displacing the Common Sense of Trauma: Han Kang’s A Boy Is Coming
3. Fabricating the Real: Accounting for North Korea in Escapee Narratives and in Fiction
4. Disturbing Sensibility: Transgressing Generic Norms in Castaway on the Moon and I’m a Cyborg, but That’s OK
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Christopher P. Hanscom is a professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of The Real Modern: Literary Modernism and the Crisis of Representation in Colonial Korea (2013), as well as coeditor of Imperatives of Culture: Selected Essays on Korean History, Literature, and Society from the Japanese Colonial Era (2013) and The Affect of Difference: Representations of Race in East Asian Empire (2016).