The Pitfalls of Literary Globalization: Korea's Self Othering in Ahn Junghyo's Silver Stallion

Pak Inchan(박인찬) 새한영어영문학회 2009 새한영어영문학 Vol.51 No.1

This paper critically examines the problems of literary globalization in the novel of Ahn Junghyo, a prestigious translator and well-known novelist of Korea. As the repeating slogan "The most Korean is the most global!" implies, the project of globalizing Korean Literature has insisted on promoting the national for the global recognition. An odd mixture of cultural nationalism and obsessive globalism that underlies the slogan, however, holds the author split between two demands of having to represent what is most Korean and, at the same time, to be incorporated with the global order. Those two seemingly incompatible demands go hand in hand with each other in Ahn's Silver Stallion: A Novel of Korea, a novel of the Korean War originally intended for American readers and written in both Korean and English, yet at the expense of objectifying Korea as an oriental Other for the West. It is revealed through an analysis of the differences between Korean and English texts. Ahn's cultural translation tends to rely on stereotypes and exoticism and, more seriously, repeats sexualizing the national for the Western eyes. In this sense Ahn's novel shows an example of self-orientalization that literary globalization might fall into.

순수의 이면: 샐린저의 『호밀밭의 파수꾼』에 나타난 남성성 추구의 딜레마

박인찬(Pak, Inchan) 새한영어영문학회 2015 새한영어영문학 Vol.57 No.1

This paper aims to study the problematics of a search for authentic masculinity in J. D. Salinger’s widely-read The Catcher in the Rye. It is well known that Salinger’s masterpiece acidly protests against the corrosive materialism of modern America from the perspective of a young protagonist Holden Caulfield, who struggles with growing up into adulthood. Holden envisions himself as a catcher, one who saves innocence from being corrupted into what he calls the ‘phony’ world without. For Holden, the catcher reflects a dream of his own authentic masculinity that he wishes to realize against the standardized masculinities of the conformist society. Then, as this paper argues, Holden’s vision is highly complicated. While it is intimately related with the social changes of the mid-20th century America that David Riesman mapped out, it seems the vision itself cannot be constructed without Holden’s self-sublimating obsession with innocence. Holden risks such process to deny growing up, but the failure of growth he chooses may be a meaningful resistance to conformist society and an effort to leave room for self-reflection.

포스트트루스 시대의 혐오정치: 워드 켄덜의 『오늘을 견뎌라』를 중심으로

박인찬 ( Inchan Pak ) 한국현대영미소설학회 2021 현대영미소설 Vol.28 No.3

This paper aims to discuss the relationship between the phenomenon of post-truth and the politics of emotion and thereby examine Ward Kendall’s SF Hold Back This Day. According to the Oxford Dictionaries that named it 2016’s word of the year, post-truth is defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective fact are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” It is true that a post-truth era has arrived, when emotion has more weight than evidence, and alternative facts replace actual facts. This paper focuses on the fact that the politics of post-truth necessarily relies on the politics of emotion. Post-truth amounts to a form of political domination for which its practitioners exploit people’s particular emotions and psychological bias and compel them to believe in something whether there is evidence or not. Disgust is a major emotion that this study pays more attention to. It refers to a group of interrelated aversive emotions, that is, what this paper calls a triad complex of disgust, hatred, and fear. As well known, the era of Donald Trump revealed how intimately the politics of post-truth got hand in hand with the politics of disgust. Hold Back This Day, one of white supremacist favorites that Trump and his closest far-right allies have been indulged in, shows an interesting example of how the politics of post-truth and emotion can effectively contribute to propagating a dystopian future of white extinction that appeals to both the hatred of non-white people and the revival of white nation. By analyzing Kendall’s narrative, this paper hopes to draw more attention to the problems of post-truth and its politics.

포스트휴먼으로 가는 길 인간과 기계의 공(共)진화를 중심으로

박인찬 ( Pak Inchan ) 영미문학연구회 2017 안과 밖 Vol.0 No.43

This essay illuminates a recent trend of what has been called the posthuman, or posthumanism to explore the possibility of coevolution of human and machine. Since science and technology have brought almost unprecedented achievements to human society for the last few decades, there have been a number of efforts to reconsider the knowledge and beliefs we have maintained about humanity. The posthuman refers to re-creating the human after the long-established humanism, while posthumanism comprises the attempts to define the changes of humanity that cannot be explained with previous criteria, and to radically reorient a relationship between the human and the nonhuman. Articulating at first the theoretical issues and characteristics of posthumanism through the comparison of transhumanism and critical posthumanism, this study explores a possible way to the posthuman via human-machine coevolution in which humans and robots coexist and influence one another. The essay then offers a comparative reading of two classical examples, Isaac Asimov’s “The Bicentennial Man” and Philip Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

사물의 시대에 오신 것을 환영함: 포스트휴머니즘의 새 접근

박인찬 ( Inchan Pak ) 한국현대영미소설학회 2017 현대영미소설 Vol.24 No.2

This paper aims at introducing a recent trend of what has been called the posthuman, or posthumanism. Since science and technology brought almost unprecedented achievements to human society for the last few decades, there have been a number of efforts to reconsider the knowledge and beliefs that we have had about humanity. The posthuman refers to re-creating the human after humanism that the modern has established a long while, while posthumanism comprises the attempts to define the changes of humanity that can`t be explained any longer with previous criteria and further to radically reorient a relationship between human and non-human. The so-called `New Materialisms` and `Thing Theory` are new entries in the field of posthumanism. Examining at first the issues and problematics of posthumanism especially in relation to transhumanism and critical posthumanism, this study brings major tenets of new materialisms and thing theory to light. To deliver this purpose less formally, it both starts and ends with brief comments on well-known American novels that representatively articulate the environments of the posthuman.

‘이후’의 인문학, 융합의 교차점에서

박인찬(Inchan Pak) 숙명여자대학교 숙명인문학연구소 2018 횡단인문학 Vol.1 No.1

우리는 인문학 열풍과 인문학 위기의 일견 모순된 시대에 살고 있다. 대학의 바깥에서는 과잉이지만 정작 안에서는 위기인 게 지금의 인문학이다. 그렇다면 대학의 인문학이 직면한 문제는 무엇이며, 그것을 타계할 수 있는 방법은 무엇인가. 이 글은 숙명인문학연구소가 개최한 창립기념 학술대회 “인문학의 최전선에서: 미래를 위한 도전과 과제”에서 기조강연의 목적으로 처음 발표되었다. 대학에서의 인문학이 처해 있는 현실을 진단하는 한편, 전통과 쇄신의 기로에 서 있는 인문학의 방향을 다양한 학문분야들이 학문적 ‘행위자’들로서 관계를 맺는 ‘이후’의 인문학에서 찾고자 한다. 그리고 이러한 ‘이후’의 인문학을 실천하기 위한 제도적 발판으로 인문학연구소가 무엇보다도 중요하다는 게 이 글의 주장이다. Today is a seemingly contradictory age in which the humanities are exposed both to enthusiastic needs and serious crisis. Overabundant outside, yet impoverished inside college are the humanities now. Then, what are the problems that confront the humanities at college, and how could they be overcome? This essay was originally presented as a keynote speech in the conference entitled “At the Frontline of the Humanities: Challenges and Tasks for the Future” held to celebrate the foundation of the Sookmyung Research Institute of Humanities. Examining on the one hand the reality in which the humanities at college are placed, it suggests the ‘post’-humanities that aim at multifaceted networking and transaction of disciplinary ‘actants’ in the wake of Bruno Latour as the necessary future of the humanities at the crossroads of tradition and renovation. For this aim, as this paper finally argues, the significance that the Research Institute of Humanities shall have cannot be emphasized too much.

‘풀씨’와 ‘편지’

박인찬(Pak, Inchan) 새한영어영문학회 2016 새한영어영문학 Vol.58 No.3

This paper aims to read the conspiracy of hope in “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and The Crying of Lot 49. Although the two texts, which were written across more than ten decades, respectively represent early modern and postmodern American fiction, they share similar concerns about how hope could be possible under the capitalist system of the United States that has dehumanized its subjects and has collapsed community into an irrevocable crisis. ‘Conspiracy’ implies the mode how hope is structurally embedded within the texts and a hermeneutic desire for hope that they prompt readers to exploit in searching for another order of meaning. In Melville’s work, the symbols of grass-seed and letters serve for the conspiracy of hope that the narrator contains with his conspiratorial discourse of Providence and seals up by benevolently mourning Bartleby’s death. Interestingly, the metaphor of mail delivery that led the narrator to stigmatize Bartleby as a dead man comes to the front in Pynchon’s work as an alternative system of the dispossessed. Against the cultural paranoia of the Cold War era, Pynchon disturbs its binary structure to explore a possible territory of flight of hope that the excluded middle retains.

동양과 서양 사이

박인찬(Pak, Inchan) 새한영어영문학회 2012 새한영어영문학 Vol.54 No.1

This paper aims to explore the problematics of transcultural communication through a study of Drabble’s The Red Queen. Enthralled by Lady Hyegyong’s memoirs, Drabble appoints herself as a writer of “a fifth memoir,” declaring it a transcultural work demonstrating that there should be universal and essential values against muticultural tolerance and postmodern relativism. As this study argues, however, Drabble’s approach is very problematic. Her reconstruction repeats the liberal humanist feminism. Drabble’s Hyegyong is a female champion of individual subject who never loses the universal, unique, and essential self. Drabble’s transculturalism gives priority to the universal that goes beyond the particular of different cultures. For her, culture is something contingent to be avoided for a universal whole. This assumption permeates the way she represents Korea. Drabble’s Korea falls prey to easy generalization and tourist sightseeing. As in the episode of adoption, Drabble’s cosmopolitanism reproduces the imperial views of the West toward the East, in which the East is seen as the other, as objects of patronizing, benevolence, and redemption, by the West.

필립 딕의 키치 세상: 『안드로이드들은 전기 양을 꿈꾸는가?』를 통해 본 인간, 기계, 그리고 과학소설

박인찬 ( Inchan Pak ) 한국현대영미소설학회 2015 현대영미소설 Vol.22 No.3

This paper aims to study Philip K. Dick`s well-known science fiction Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? in terms of kitsch. Originally, this study derived from two different research interests: one in the aesthetic achievements of Dick`s novel as a popular genre of science fiction, the other in a theme of the relationship between man and machine in the novel. Dick`s ‘kitsch world’ is the phrase designed to encompass those two interests with the extended concepts and categories of kitsch and, at the same time, to epitomize the future world that Dick prophets in his work. Defining Dick as a writer of kitsch world, this paper starts with introducing many-layered concepts of kitsch, such as imitations, things of kitsch, the subjective attitudes of viewers, the artificial environments of mechanical objects, and kitsch as an art style. Then it goes on to specific elaborations on a variety of kitsch styles that mark Dick`s science fiction as an artifice of popular genre. Finally, the third section of this paper deals with Dick`s critique of humanist individual subject, tracing how Rick Deckard`s changing views of androids lead to a vision of the posthuman that man and androids commiserate and shape one another`s existence. By so doing, this paper argues, Dick shows the future of kitsch world in which a technological object can become a subject and thus interact with man.