The Marmot’s Hole

Royal Asiatic Society - Korea  will hold its first semi-monthly Lecture-Meeting of April on Tuesday the 10th, at 7:30 pm, in the 2nd-floor Resident’s Lounge of the Somerset Palace Residence (downtown, near Anguk Station, west of Exit #6; north of Jogye-sa Temple).   All in English and open to the public, as always; more info: 763-9483 and www.raskb.com  (includes a map and a complete description of the talk).

This evening will feature Translator/Editor/Professor Michael D. Shin (Asian Studies at Cornell University, now visiting scholar at Yonsei’s Institute for Korean Studies) speaking on “Yi Kwangsu’s ‘Mujong’ and the Origins of Modern Korean Literature”.

On January 1st of 1917, writer Yi Kwang-su (1892-1950) began serializing the novel Mujeong (The Heartless) in the Maeil sinbo.  It was an immediate sensation, and there are stories of people walking miles to get the newspaper in order to read the next installment. It was also controversial; Confucianists visited the office of the newspaper, demanding that the serialization of such an immoral story be stopped. The novel now occupies a prominent place in the Korean literary canon, and it is widely considered to be the first modern Korean novel. It goes beyond the level of romantic melodrama and uses its characters to depict Korea’s struggles with modern culture and national identity. This talk will focus on two issues: the role of the novel in the origins of modern Korean literature and the reasons for its popularity.

My own RAS Lecture from January, about Jiri-san as a sacred mountain, is still the featured one linked from the upper-right page at http://www.korea.com — we can expect that it’ll change to the next one any day now.