Modern East Asian Literature Research Cluster presents
Emerging Research on Modern East Asian Literature
The Politics of Art in Contemporary Korean Fiction
Speaker: Chris Hanscom
Professor | Department of Asian Languages and Cultures | UCLA
Moderator: Su Yun Kim
Associate Professor | Korean Studies | The University of Hong Kong
DATE: 21 FEB 2025 (FRI) 4:30–6:00 pm (HKT)
VENUE: Room 436, 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU
REGISTRATION:
Using examples from fiction and photography this talk will explore the relationship between art and politics, particularly regarding the aesthetic representation of atrocity. What kind of remembering is adequate to the traumatic event, and can how the representation of such memory avoid both the cycle of endless melancholic return and the forgetting that accompanies the “memorization” of that past? Where politics is defined as the struggle over the propriety of language, it is the work of art, not the archival document, that stands at the juncture of the imperative to remember and the prohibition against making sense of the inexplicable.
Chris Hanscom is a professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at UCLA, where he teaches courses on Korean literature and film and is director of the UCLA Korean Humanities Initiative.
The series is coordinated by Prof. Su Yun Kim (suyunkim@hku.hk), Prof. Pei-yin Lin (pylin@hku.hk), and Prof. Alvin Wong (akhwong@hku.hk), and is supported by the School of Chinese, School of Humanities, and School of Modern Languages and Cultures.
For registration of the seminar, go to www.meal.hku.hk or https://bit.ly/MEAL21Feb2025.
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