Hwang Sok-yong at Korea Society

by Robert Koehler on October 27, 2009

If you live in the New York metropolitan area, you might consider popping by the Korea Society this Thursday to listen to one of Korea’s greatest living writers, novelist Hwang Sok-yong:

Please join us for a special reception with prize-winning author Hwang Sok-yong to mark the release of his major novel, The Old Garden, in English translation. During the reception, Mr. Hwang will discuss the literary life and his new book with Theodore Hughes, Assistant Professor of Modern Korean Literature, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Columbia University.

Hwang Sok-yong is one of Korea’s most revered novelists, and The Old Garden, published in translation by Seven Stories Press, is his masterwork. A sweeping history of modern Korea, The Old Garden was published in anticipation of the 60th anniversary of the beginning of the Korean War. In it, Hwang expresses timeless themes—the endurance of love and the price of commitment to a cause—while depicting a singular generation that sacrificed youth, liberty, and often life, for the dream of a better tomorrow.

“Hwang Sok-yong is undoubtedly the most powerful voice of the novel in East Asia.” – Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe
[...]
Thursday, October 29, 2009
6:30 PM-7:00 PM * Reception
7:00 PM-8:30 PM * Reading, Q&A & Reception

The Korea Society
950 Third Avenue @ 57th Street, 8th Floor
(Building entrance on SW corner of Third Avenue and 57th Street)

$10 for members and students, $20 for nonmembers
(Walk-in registration will incur an additional charge of $5.)

If you don’t have time to read “The Old Garden,” it was turned into a very watchable film by director Im Sang-soo.

{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }

1 Sperwer October 27, 2009 at 3:41 pm: North Korea expert B.R. Myers, who also has something of a reputation as aliterary critic terrible has savaged Hwang in a NYT review of Hwang’s “The Old Garden” , where he takes the leftist Korean “intelligentsia”[sic], in the person of Hwang to the woodshed . Here’s the money stroke of the switch:

The striving for simplicity and emotionality among students bewildered by long reading lists is, as the historian Ernst Nolte once wrote, “almost disgustingly easy to explain.” Harder to understand is why a man of Hwang’s age and experience would want to present this striving as something the world needs more of. … The hunch that we are dealing here with an ideology even sillier than Marxism is confirmed in one of Yoon Hee’s lines: “It’s a fight that has continued for over a hundred years since we opened up the port.” In other words, Korea’s problems began when it ceased to be the Hermit Kingdom. The penny drops: this is how the students could have fought so heroically against a pro-American dictator in Seoul, yet found so little cause to criticize the paranoid nationalist thugs in Pyongyang.

Gypsy Scholar recently also published a series of reflections on Hwang’s earlier novel, The Guest, here, here, here, here and here
2 jefferyhodges October 27, 2009 at 5:57 pm: Thanks, Sperwer, for the links . . . though they appear to go to the comments only. Let me try:

Hwang Sok-yong and smallpox as ‘Guest’ in Korea

Hwang Sok-yong: Smallpox as a ‘Western’ Disease?

Hwang Sok-yong “anti-American pro North Korean toady”?

Hwang Sok-yong: “The ghosts of North and South Korea”

Hwang Sok-Yong: “the Guest is a Western disease”

I hope those links work.

Jeffery Hodges

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3 jefferyhodges October 28, 2009 at 4:54 am: I’ve put up another post with further reflections on Hwang Sok-yong’s novel The Guest . . . in case anyone is interested in my “oily undergraduate pretensions,” as one commenter has described them.

Jeffery Hodges

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4 Sperwer October 28, 2009 at 1:42 pm: Jeffery, I’ll be looking forward to more along the lines of your latest using Hwang as a window onto the issue of Korean identity.

There is, of course, something very strange going on, though, when “the call for a return to what is traditionally, exclusively, and authentically Korea” focus on the figure of Dangun, who is a chimera more or less invented in the late “medieval” period, who didn’t become a figure of significant cultural interest until the middle Joseon and whose real status as a cultural icon only became establsihed in the late 19th century – precisely in reaction to Westernization (see the work of Sin Ch’ae-ho).

The best thing on the subject of Korean identity that I’ve read recently is the dissertation of a young Dutch scholar, Remco Breuker: “When Truth is Everywhere: The Formation of Plural Identities in Medieval Korea, 918-1170″.
5 hardyandtiny October 28, 2009 at 2:44 pm: I’m never going to read any of it but I will say that’s a very nice photo of him sitting there holding his foot.
6 jefferyhodges October 28, 2009 at 7:42 pm: Sperwer, I’ll gladly send you the final draft . . . but don’t expect much. The essay is explicitly intended for non-scholarly consumption.

Jeffery Hodges

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