The Institute for Korean Studies presents:
Sunyoung Park
East Asian Languages and Cultures and Gender and Sexuality Studies
University of Southern California
Title: Ecodystopian Posthumanism: Nuclear Apocalyptic Fiction and Cli-Fi in South Korea
Flyer: Sunyoung Park Flyer
**THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED**
Abstract: This presentation examines the development of environmentalist themes in South Korean science fiction from the 1960s through the 2010s. Environmental themes have been relatively rarely treated in the local practice of the genre. While also inquiring into the reasons for the scarcity, the analysis will concentrate on three examples of existing works: Kim Yunju’s 1960 existentialist novella “Apocalypse in Relief,” Sin Kihwal’s 1989 post-apocalyptic graphic satire Here Come Nuclear Bugs, and Kim Changgyu’s 2017 cli-fi story “Only to Be.” Distinctive of these works is a tendency to reflect upon an ecocatastrophe by blurring the boundaries between the human, the animal, and the machine. This “ecodystopian posthumanism,” it will be suggested, reflects a shared belief, among the writers, in the existence of intimate ties between developmentalism and humanism in South Korea’s process of techno-industrial modernization.
Sunyoung Park is associate professor in the departments of East Asian Languages and Cultures and of Gender Studies at the University of Southern California. She is the author of The Proletarian Wave: Literature and Leftist Culture in Colonial Korea, 1910-1945 (Harvard University Asia Center, 2015) and the editor of Revisiting Minjung: New Perspectives on the Cultural History of 1980s South Korea (University of Michigan Press, 2019). Her research is broadly focused on the literary and cultural history of modern and contemporary Korea, which she approaches from the varying perspectives of Marxism, postcolonial theory, transnational feminism, and cultural studies. In synergy with this research, Prof. Park is also active as an editor and translator of Korean fiction into English, which has resulted, among others, in the publication of two collections of short stories: On the Eve of the Uprising and Other Stories from Colonial Korea (Cornell East Asian Series, 2010) and Ready-Made Bodhisattva and Other Science Fiction Stories from South Korea (Kaya Press, 2019). She is currently at work on a monographic critical treatment of science fictional literature, film, and graphic art in South Korea during the last sixty years.
Free and Open to the Public
The IKS Lecture Series is supported by a U.S. Department of Education Title VI grant to The Ohio State University East Asian Studies Center.
