Reading Colonial Korea through Fiction

Reading Colonial Korea through Fiction: The Ventriloquists introduces to the English-speaking world the work of Kim Chul, one of the leading scholars of modern Korean literature, who has helped to reshape the field of Korean studies on both sides of the Pacific. The thirteen essays anthologized together in the volume give the reader a glimpse into Kim Chul’s pioneering scholarship that effectively puts modern ‘Korea’ under erasure through his unrelenting exploration of ‘Korea’s’ multiplicity, paradoxicality, ambivalence, and contradictions that stem from the imbrications of colonization, modernization, nation-building, and empires. This study, which combines Kim’s expansive insights about colonial modernity with his razor-sharp close readings of amazing colonial literary works, is eminently teachable and will make an indispensable companion to numerous related college courses. -- Jin-Kyung Lee, University of California, San Diego
Brilliant, learned, provocative—and yes, political and controversial—at last we have an English-language translation of essays by one of the world’s most influential and ingenious scholars of Korean language and literature. From train travel and the postal service, to the telephone and the production of the national language, punctuation and dialects; from eroticism to love, intermarriage, and eating, and even the gold rush under total war mobilization—through his highly original readings of these and other traces of everyday life embedded in colonial literature, Kim Chul unveils the impossibility of discovering an unadulterated national language, literature, or culture. His perceptive and deeply informed readings demonstrate that while necessary, critiques of colonialism need not, in fact must not, succumb to the nationalist desire for authenticity and the national pristine. This is a critical and yet hopeful book that should be read by not only those with an interest in the colonial modern in Korea, but by anyone seeking to navigate out of the predicaments of the postcolonial present. -- Takashi Fujitani, University of Toronto