IKS Lecture: Dafna Zur, "When Songs Don’t Work: Western Tonalities and Korean Breath in Korean Tongyo"

The Institute for Korean Studies presents:

"When Songs Don’t Work: Western Tonalities and Korean Breath in Korean Tongyo"

Dafna Zur
Stanford University

Abstract: In the 1920s, colonial Korean children had different opportunities and materials to sing. Newly established missionary schools adapted hymns for children, and the colonial schools run by the Japanese regime considered song time to be essential to children’s development.  Against this background, original Korean sung poems, or tongyo, emerged. These were short poems written by prominent literary figures that were set to music by Korean composers who studied western music in Japan.  These composers saw themselves writing against the musical ecology of their time of Christian hymns (ch’ansongga) and Japanese school songs (changga). This paper examines tongyo by two seminal figures, Yun Kŭgyŏng and Chŏng Sunch’ŏl. Through an analysis of music and poetry, the paper illuminates how they imagined tongyo might deliver modern subjectivity. By comparing the two composers, the paper unveils the challenges of fitting western tonalities to the Korean language, and thus seems to complicate the broad assumption about tongyo as pure aesthetic and profoundly national forms. 

Dafna Zur is an Associate Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Stanford University where she teaches courses on Korean literature, cinema, and popular culture. Her book, Figuring Korean Futures: Children’s Literature in Modern Korea (Stanford University Press, 2017), traces the investments and aspirations made possible by children’s literature in colonial and postcolonial Korea. She is working on a new project on science and literature in Cold War North and South Korea. She has published articles on North Korean popular science and science fiction, North Korean translations, the Korean War in North and South Korean children’s literature, childhood in cinema, and Korean popular culture. Her translations of Korean fiction have appeared in wordwithoutborders.org, The Columbia Anthology of Modern Korean Short Stories, and the Asia Literary Review.