Aliju Kim | Standing on Colonial Ruins
Standing on Colonial Ruins: Decadence as a Place of Beginning in Ruins (P’yehŏ; 1920-21)
Northrop Frye Centre (VC102)
91 Charles St West Toronto, ON M5S1K5
The NFC is pleased to invite a talk from our NFC Doctoral Fellow, Aliju Kim (East Asian Studies).
About the talk...
What does it mean for young writers of modern Korean literature in the first two decades of the 20th century to have understood their times as decadent? In this talk, I discuss the emergence and development of decadence as an aesthetic style in the magazine Ruins, one of the earliest and most prominent coterie magazines to be published in Korea. As a little magazine, Ruins immediately throws into light the transnational and translational literary networks that foreground debates over modernity and modern literature that arose in early 20th century Korea. What really sets apart Ruins from the myriad magazines from this period, however, is its literary commitment to decadence, revealing the interesting ways in which an aesthetic voice and identity, ostensibly rooted in negativity, paradoxically seems to fuel the emergent field of modern literature in Korea. As I will show, decadence is used as an important discursive mode of imagining and representing the modern, as one that is always on the brink of collapse and re-invention.
About the speaker...
Aliju Kim (she/her) is a PhD Candidate in East Asian Studies at the University of Toronto. Her dissertation examines the aesthetic sensibility of decadence as an analytic to index the paradoxical sensibility of a modernity in decline in Korean literature. More broadly, she is interested in exploring how decadence builds upon global processes of modernization and empires. Her other research interests include memory, space-time, and family sagas.