DEALL/ICS/IKS Lecture: Yoonhee Hong, "The “Nowness” of Myth in Korea and China Today"

The Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, Institute for Chinese Studies, and Institute for Japanese Studies jointly present:

"The “Nowness” of Myth in Korea and China Today"

Yoonhee Hong
Yonsei University

Abstract: What can myth do today? Myth has been the source of inspiration for creating literature and art for a long time, but with the advancement in science and technology and the rapidly changing media environment, myth in the twenty-first century is being utilized as a sort of cultural resource, and the manner in which it has been utilized has become more complex and diversified. This talk will introduce the concepts that emerged in the mythological circles of Korea and China under these circumstances such as the "return of myth," "neo-mythologism," and "mythologism", examine a few examples of myth being utilized as resources to get a glimpse of the economic, academic, and national desires that can be found in the myth resourcization, as well as finding possibilities for new creation that is beyond these desires, and discuss how we should understand the "nowness of mythology."

Yoonhee Hong is an associate professor in the Department of Chinese Language and Literature at Yonsei University, South Korea, specializing in Chinese mythology. She received her MA and Ph.D from Yonsei University. She is the author of Dragons, Chinese People and the Silk Road (Seoul, 2013), which was named the Outstanding Academic Books of 2014 by the Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism of Korea. Her other publications include Korean translation of Bruce Lincoln's Theorizing Myth(2009), Yuan Ke's History of Chinese Mythology(2010),  “Searching for the Nowness of Mythology : From the ‘Return of Myth’ to ‘Mythologism’”(Xibei Minzu Yanjiu, Northwestern Journal of Ethnology, 2021).