• Title/Summary/Keyword: Korean American poetry

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Bad Subjects and the Transnational Minjung: The Poetry of Jason Koo and Ed Bok Lee

  • Grotjohn, Robert
    • Journal of English Language & Literature
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    • v.64 no.3
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    • pp.307-327
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    • 2018
  • In light of Korean inclusion of its diaspora as part of the nation, a "creolized" approach that brings together constructions of the bad subject of Asian American studies with conceptions of the Korean minjung grounds an analysis of two poets as they might be considered from a bi-national, Korean and U.S. American, perspective. The poets Ed Bok Lee and Jason Koo show different ways of being the bad subject. Lee is clearly a bad American subject, resisting American white racial hegemony, and his poetry often addresses a kind of American minjung multiculturalism, as is shown in poems from his first two books Real Karaoke People and Whorled. He challenges some aspects of contemporary Korea, and might be a kind of Korean bad subject in those challenges. Koo, on the other hand, resists the call to bad subjectivity, so that his poetry may not fit the preferred paradigm of Asian American studies, as he recognizes. As he resists that paradigm, he also gives little attention to his Korean heritage, so his not-bad American subjectivity becomes bad Korea subjectivity. He recovers some measure of badness in the final poem of Man on Extremely Small Island when he connects briefly to his Korean heritage and his Asian American present. The creolized juxtaposition of the bad subject with the minjung suggests the use of these poems in considering both American and Korean society.

The antiwar consciousness in Korean poems based on the Iraq War (이라크 전쟁을 소재로 한 한국 시의 반전의식 양상)

  • Mun, Hye-won
    • Cross-Cultural Studies
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    • v.51
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    • pp.1-24
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    • 2018
  • The real purpose of the Iraq War was to ensure that the United States took control of Iraq's oil and retained its hegemony in the Middle East. Afterward, anti-American and anti-war movements spread around the world. The Iraq war is an important event. Korean poetry goes beyond the specificity of 'Korean War and division' and puts 'anti-war' and 'peace' at the universal level on the subject. It means joining the global and contemporary issues of 'anti-war' and 'peace'. Korean poetry based on the Iraq War is divided into three categories: poetry that accuses and testifies to the devastation, poetry that identifies the cause of the war, and poetry that presents alternatives and solutions. The poetry is linked to the idea of respect for life, and appears in the form of peace and nonviolence.

Translation and Interpretation in Korean English Poetry Reading Classes (영시 수업에서의 해석과 번역의 문제)

  • Lee, Sam-Chool
    • Cross-Cultural Studies
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    • v.45
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    • pp.55-83
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    • 2016
  • To provide a set of data with which instructors may boost the sagging demand for Anglo-American poetry classes, this thesis classifies the kinds of difficulties the students face in reading English poems. Asses to the classification is an analysis on the causes of the difficulties at different levels of the reading process, from the linguistic to the cultural. Arnoldian insight argues that poetry is the best of all forms of writing. Without an ample exposure to poetry, average English majors would barely sharpen the skills that they use to deal with other kinds of writing. To help ease the continuing need for a workable teaching model in English poetry reading classes, this thesis suggests focusing on the kinds of wrong translations produced by the students. According to the theory of cultural translation, any translation, even the wrong kind, is already a product of a very complicated process of interpretation that involves many cultural factors. With the analysis of these factors discovered in Korean college English reading classes, this thesis tries to explain the mechanisms through which wrong translations are produced, since these inevitably lead to wrong interpretations of given poetic texts.

A Study on Sun Yung Shin's Literature (신선영(Sun Yung Shin) 문학 연구)

  • Yoo, Jin Wol
    • Cross-Cultural Studies
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    • v.21
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    • pp.139-164
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    • 2010
  • Sung Yung Shin was adopted as a Korean infant to an American family. She is now one of the most important writers in Asian American literary field. This paper analyzes the characteristics of her literature, focusing on Skirt full of Black (poetry)and Cooper's Lesson(children's book). Sun Yung Shin uses collage in Skirt full of Black as an effective rhetorical device because it can express her experience as an adopted other in the multicultural American society. She rewrites the fairy tale of Swan Prince in the viewpoint of silence. For a yellow Asian adopted woman, speaking is suppressed. In the end, the attempt to escape from silence is the writer's resisting activity, and the rewriting of the tale is her questioning in place of the princess. I analyses Cooper's Lesson in the viewpoint of transcultural assimilation. Cooper's lesson is accomplished not by his white father but by a Korean settler, Mr. Lee. Cooper's family is a hybrid composed of white American father, Korean mother, and their half son. So this family has many complicated difficulties, though it's small. Mr. Lee who accepted a new language to establish a new identity teaches Cooper the importance of cultural assimilation, which is not a one-sided integration to dominant culture but an intercultural communion while sustaining each culture's singularity. Cooper learns that he should live in an harmonious and balanced life in a multi-cultural society while keeping his own subjective point of view.

The Purpose of Walt Whitman's Poetry Translation by Chung Ji Young (정지용의 월트 휘트먼 시 번역 작업의 목적: 일제 강점기와 해방 공간의 근본적 차이)

  • Jung, Hun
    • English & American cultural studies
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    • v.18 no.2
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    • pp.79-104
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    • 2018
  • Chung Ji Yong is a well-known poet in the Japanese Occupation Period firstly as a lyrical and traditional poet as a member of the literary journal Simunhak(Poetry Literature) along with Park Yong Chul and Kim Young Rang and later as a prominent modernist poet in the late years of the Period. He is always highly estimated as a poet of pictorial images and lyricism, but his ardor for translations, especially Walt Whitman has been neglected so far. Before him, Ju Yohan, Yi Kwang Soo, Yi Un Sang, Kim Hyung Won and many other poets and critics had been interested in Whitman's democratic ideas and his poems. Chung Ji Young also translated Whitman's three poems in the hard days of 1930s. After the Imperial Japan surrendered to the Allied forces on 15 August 1945, ending 35 years of Japanese occupation, Korea was under the American forces and Russian troops. In this critical days of Korean's debating only one korea or separated Koreas, strangely enough, Chung ji Yong fully immersed in translating Whitman's poems only for four years as an English literature professor just before being abducted by North Korean Army, while almost discarding his own poetic ability and sense of duty as a leading poet in the literary circle with only just a few exceptions. Why did Chung Ji Yong focused on the translation of Whitman's poems in this important period as a poet and intellectual in the newly independent country? He may want to warn people too much ideological conflicts or at least express his frustration through translating Whitman's poems. Until now, academic endeavors on Chung Ji Yong's poems and life are focused on his lyrical and modernistic works of the Japanese Occupation Period and naturally little interested in the days of Independence period and his true motivations on translating Whitman's poems. As a proposal, this short article can be a minor trigger for the sincere efforts of Chung Ji Yong's last days.

Difference, not Differentiation: The Thingness of Language in Sun Yung Shin's Skirt Full of Black

  • Shin, Haerin
    • Journal of English Language & Literature
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    • v.64 no.3
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    • pp.329-345
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    • 2018
  • Sun Yung Shin's poetry collection Skirt Full of Black (2007) brings the author's personal history as a Korean female adoptee to bear upon poetic language in daring formal experiments, instantiating the liminal state of being shuttled across borders to land in an in-between state of marginalization. Other Korean American poets have also drawn on the experience of transnational adoption and racialization explore the literary potential of English to materialize haunting memories or the untranslatable yet persistent echoes of a lost home that gestures across linguistic boundaries, as seen in the case of Lee Herrick or Jennifer Kwon Dobbs. Shin however dismantles the referential foundation of English as a language she was transplanted into through formal transgressions such as frazzled syntax, atypical typography, decontextualized punctuation marks, and phonetic and visual play. The power to signify and thereby differentiate one entity or meaning from another dissipates in the cacophonic feast of signs in Skirt Full of Black; the word fragments of identificatory markers that turn racialized, gendered, and culturally contained subjects into exotic things lose the power to define them as such, and instead become alterities by departing from the conventional meaning-making dynamics of language. Expanding on the avant-garde legacy of Korean American poets Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Myung Mi Kim to delve further into the liminal space between Korean and American, referential and representational, or spoken and written words, Shin carves out a space for discreteness that does not subscribe to the hierarchical ontology of differential value assignment.

A Study on Korean-American Writer Hong-Eun($1880\~1951$) focusing on Mong-yu siga(Traditional Korean Poetry, gasa and sijo of strolling in the dream) (재미작가 홍언의 몽유가사$\cdot$시조에 나타난 작가의식)

  • Park Mi-Young
    • Sijohaknonchong
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    • v.21
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    • pp.77-110
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    • 2004
  • This study is an exploration of a Korean-American writer, Hong-Eun's Mong-yu siga. Hong-Eun immigrated to the United States during the colonial rule of the Japanese government. He was a publisher of The New Korea Times, and contributed various literary works to it. The purpose of this study is to analyze his two Mong-yu sigas published in 1935 and 1947 and elucidate their meanings. Using dream as a primary motif, the intention of Mong-yu mode is to achieve desire which is impossible to reach in reality. While his staying in the United States, Hong-Eun could not return his home country for two reasons, that is, political and financial ones. To return Korea desperately, he wrote sigas by adopting Mong-yu mode. His first attempt was reflected as eight pieces of consecutive poetries titled This Mountain In My Dream, I am Home. This Mountain was published on the 25th of April, 1935 and In My Dream, I am Home was contributed from May the 9th of 1935 to July the fourth of the same year. These works were published in the The New Korea Times' poetry column under the pen name of Donghae-soboo , Representing gasa of the enlightenment era, this poetry depicts historical identity of Chosun dynasty, especially focusing on before and after the 1900s. As a result of it, the poetry sketches the ideology of the Middle Ages. His second attempt was A Country and Hometown written as a form of prelude on the 25th of September, 1947. In addition, A Country in My Dream was published as a form of six pieces of consecutive poetry from October the second to November the sixth of 1947. He chose sijo as a major form of poetry, and the image of the poetry seemed to be the continuation of his first attempt. Confronting the reality of the his own country which is divided, the writer expresses his antagonism toward America and Russia. Although he could eventually return his country later, he rationalized himself by saying that his it is not the ideal place to go. Mong-yu mode is a traditional poetic technique which the intellectuals of the Middle Age used to use as one pattern of allegory. In addition to this, in the period of the enlightenment of Korea, Mong-yu was used to avoid the Japanese censorship and experiment on the diverse ways of writing. In terms of literary history, the significance of Hong-Eun's creation of Mong-yu sigas is that Hong-Eun shares the same intention with Korean intellectuals of the enlightenment period.

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An Analysis on Medical Humanity and Social Science in Foreign Medical schools (국외 인문사회의학 교육과정 현황)

  • Kim, Sang Hyun
    • Korean Medical Education Review
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    • v.10 no.1
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    • pp.19-33
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    • 2008
  • Purpose: This study is purposed to analyze the curriculum on medical humanity and social science in foreign medical schools. The Main topics are classified into three parts: the characteristics of American medical humanity and social science curriculum: understanding of medical humanity and social science in medical school in USA, UK, and Australia: standard recommendations on medical ethics and professionalism in curriculum design. Methods: The literature reviews and on-line searching were conducted to collect the information and data on medical humanity and social science in foreign medical schools, 9 medical schools were selected in terms of reputations in USA, UK, and Australia. Results: First, American medical humanity and social science curriculum have changed, especially from cores to electives, from informal to formal and from subjects to interdisciplinary. In addition. teaching methods have changed into small-group discussion and teaching materials into various sources, such as essays, poetry, films and so forth. Second, most medical schools had their own unique curriculum adjusted to their academic traditions. Especially, curriculum of UK and Australia were more integrated than those of USA. Finally, it is recommended that standards of medical ethics and professionalism have to be considered in curriculum design. Conclusion: It is suggested that medical humanity and social science curriculum be designed closely connecting with clinical medicine.