The RAS Korean Literature Club discussion

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Not long ago, I came across an academic commentary on Korean Literature's once-conspicuous unpopularity -- that is to say its failure, in market terms, or in cultural soft-power terms -- up through the mid-2010s (and arguably up through the late-2010s). The scholar John Lie is the writer of this commentary.

John Lie was doing sociological studies of the early K-Culture Wave in the West at the time (mid-2010s). Here he is writing in about late 2013; published in early 2014. The article's title is:

"South Korean Literature in the Age of the Korean Wave: Soft Power, Literary Value, and Cultural Policy in South Korea."

What I like about this paper is it gives us a moment-in-time snapshot of views from the mid-2010s. It's of interest to revisit in the mid-2020s (or whenever you people of a more-distant future may see this), if we're interested in this rise of Korean-literature-in-translation phenomenon.

I'll re-post long excerpts from the paper in subsequent posts, after I get my own commentary out the way.

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John Lie, for those who may not know, is a US scholar of Korean ancestral origin. I believe he was either born, or at least raised from relatively early childhood, in the US. He certainly writes like a native-speaker.

John Lie has a cheerfully contrarian posture. His impressive academic pedigree (professor at Berkeley; successive degrees from Harvard: BA, 1982; MA, 1984; PhD, 1988); his "tenure" status; his fame; and (frankly) his status as being fully outside Korea itself (when he enters Korea he is a visitor, i.e., he is not beholden to Korean institutions) allow him the liberty to punch through various taboos, to say things that those of comparable stature tend to "leave unsaid." (You'll see what I mean, if you read this commentary.)

Familiarity with his output has led me to think of John Lie, despite the spelling of his family-name, as a truth-teller. (Note: Please do ask John Lie, if you meet him, why he romanizes the family-name "리/이" with those three letters; but at least it's unique.) Entirely too many people active in the Korean Studies world tend towards being yes-men, to a degree that my idealism says a scholar ought not to be.

In any case, visiting Korea on a fellowship in 2013 and observing the state of Korean literature, John Lie got inspired to write this commentary. In addition to his book K-Pop (2014) which was working on at the same time. John Lie is a Korean, at least by parental origin, but not necessarily a Korea Booster.

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By the mid-2010s, it was starting to look like K-Culture Wave was moving past its origins in "lower-hanging-fruit regions" such as Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asia generally. That is to say, the K-Culture Wave was approaching the shores of the West in a fuller or more-confident manner than it had managed in the late 2000s or early 2010s.

(I'd could take for a while with observations on this trend, possibly having some meaningful insights on the matter from my back-and-forth status between Korea and the US throughout the 2010s. At almost no time in that interesting decade was I ever too long in a happy rut (or, more usually, an unhappy rut) and my situations were always shifting, circulating among different crowds. But I'll limit myself from that tangent. Ask me later, if you really want.)

One thing that virtually no one talked about yet, in the mid-2010s, or even much in the late-2010s in my memory, was Korean Literature. That despite people starting to perceive a K-Culture Wave gathering strength.

Those who knew the field (of Korean literature) well could tell you many good reasons why Westerners (or perhaps any non-Koreans, or at least non-East Asians) would probably never be interested in Korean literature.

See, for example, elsewhere at our GoodReads discussion-page:

[1.] "Is there any hope that Korean literature will gain popularity overseas? 'Honestly, No' -- Brother Anthony of Taize, July 2014" ---- https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/... ; and

[2.] "Translator Bruce Fulton on Korean literature's trauma, gloominess, provincialism [writing ca.2009] (and We Do Not Part)" --- https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

It's a point I find myself making over and over in the context of Korean literature -- to those who are around to listen or read, and who are interested and/or polite enough to listen -- is this:

As recently as the mid-2010s, Korean literature-in-translation had a really minuscule, minimal profile. No one respected it; no one was interested in it. (This is only a slight exaggeration.)

The bookstores in Seoul, which you'd expect to be pushers of this material on well-meaning outsiders, hardly had any Korean-to-English translated-fiction titles! (Today they are full of them; entire large display-tables devoted to Korean-to-English translated-fiction.)

As of the mid-2010s, you had to search out into semi-obscurity for this material. Much of it was being published as if for some kind of foreign-language-study purposes, as if a tacit acknowledgement that no market could sustain it on its own merit. The Korean-and-English side-by-side "Bilingual Editions" of Korean short-stories, which you could find at the time, were frankly of mixed quality. They didn't inspire much confidence on the whole. Some were good; but the "hit rate" was a too low for comfort.

A few years later the same company began producing a revamped "K-Fiction" series that was noticeably better in average quality but still retained many of the same problems of spotty translations and the Korean-English back-to-back translations. That remained a norm, or nearly so, as the 2010s came to a close.

(Korean-directed endeavors of this kind tend to sacrifice quality for price and convenience. Many of the translated-fiction stories put out up to the mid-2010s, and even beyond, appear to have been done by persons not-quite-qualified, linguistically speaking, to translate fiction; and not edited well.)

Those walking in "fresh" today, into the Korean literature-in-translation fresh here around the mid-2020s, would hardly believe that that was how things stood as recently as ten years ago, maybe even closer to six or seven years ago.

By the early 2020s, things had changed a lot. How? Why? When Where? Who?

Let me now step away, turn back the clock to winter 2013-14 and give the floor to Professor John Lie.

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To follow, "South Korean Literature in the Age of the Korean Wave: Soft Power, Literary Value, and Cultural Policy in South Korea," by John Lie [written ca. late 2013; published in winter 2013-14 edition of the Korea Observer academic journal.

(I believe, per policy of the Institute of Korean Studies, the publisher, that transposing portions of the contents of this 6500-word article here, for easy reading, violates no policy of theirs. The full article is, incidentally, is free to access to anyone. It is difficult to find on their website, not given in html, and seems not searchable.)
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(Part 1 of 4, "South Korean literature in the age of the Korean Wave," by John Lie, 2013.)

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SOUTH KOREAN LITERATURE IN THE AGE OF THE KOREAN WAVE: SOFT POWER, LITERARY VALUE, and CULTURAL POLICY IN SOUTH KOREA

Published in the Korea Observer [Institute of Korean Studies / Bundang, South Korea], Vol. 44, No. 4 (Winter 2013-14).

by John Lie

John Lie is a Professor of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley; in 2013, he was an International Scholar at Kyung Hee University.

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ABSTRACT

South Korean popular culture has generated a great deal of interest abroad, making South Korea into a potentially major soft power.

In spite of the global dissemination of South Korean popular make and television drama, there is a genre that remains relatively unknown abroad: literature.

This paper seeks to explain the reasons why South Korean literature is not part of the Korean Wave. In addition, the paper points to the potential problems of cultural policy that seeks to export "culture" global popularity may very well vitiate cultural content.

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1. INTRODUCTION

"Gangnam Style" transformed the rumor of the Korean Wave into a global common sense in 2012. The propulsive beats, the ear worm-inducing refrains ("hey, sexy lady"), and the pony-gallop dance steps were ubiquitous virtually around the world. In fact, several years earlier, Asian, European, and Latin American youths were already swaying to the beats of K-pop (South Korean popular music), registering impressive numbers of downloads as well as visible displays of K-pop's expanding influence (Lie., 2014). Indeed, any future history of the global impact of South Korean popular culture will devote some pages to the middle-aged Japanese women who were flocking to iconic sites of South Korean television drama and becoming a social phenomenon and an enduring subculture in Japanese life by the mid 2000s (Ibid. Forthcoming). Around the same time, well-heeled Chinese consumers were seeking the latest in South Korean fashion and face-lift: South Korean models came to exemplify not only the culturally cool but the very definition of beauty in China and other Asian countries (Yu and Ko, 2012). If one were to engage in archaeology of the Korean Wave, then one may very well look to cineastes in Britain and elsewhere who were discussing the new wave South Korean films nearly two decades before "Gangnam Style" (Rayns, 1994). These and other examples of South Korean cultural export -- the Korean Wave [Hallyu] -- can be seen around the world and testify to South Korea's newfound soft power.

One genre, however, seems very much outside the Korean wave: literature, or novels, stories, plays, and poems: the world of imaginative fiction. Avid readers of world literature in the early twenty-first century can readily name and discuss the work of Murakami Haruki and Orham Pamuk or Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Wole Soyinka, but very few non-South Koreans can name even a single author from South Korea. South Korean literature, in other words, remains ensconced in the South Korean nation and its dwindling reading public. Some reasons readily spring to mind. Perhaps Korean as a minor language consignes South Korean literature to be a minor literature?

Yet Japanese or Turkish is hardly spoken beyond its national borders. and there are numerous writers from much smaller linguistic communities who gamer global esteem (most recently, Karl Ove Knausgaard from Norway), Perhaps literature as a genre hasn't attracted the most able talent within South Korea? This is surely not the case in a civilization that has valorized learning and letters and where literature often forged the soul of the nation. I would not deny that these and other factors are well worth considering and they may indeed play significant roles in explaining the problematic at hand: Why hasn't South Korean literature attained global popularity whereas other genres of South Korean culture have attracted fans and fanatics around the world?

Needless to say, it would be possible to expatiate on the reasons discussed above but I believe that the principal problem lies elsewhere. That is, it may very well be the case that Korean is a minor language and perhaps even that the life of letters is devalued in contemporary South Korean society. I suggest, however, that there are broad cultural reasons for the relative absence or failure of South Korean literature beyond South Korea. The most important is the disarticulation between the norm of Eurocentric world literature and traditional and even modern Korean literature. In brief, the particular virtues of South Korean literature (and traditional Korean literature in general do not resonate well with the aesthetic qualities valorized in European influenced world literature. More troublingly, greater state encouragement or financial investment in and of itself is unlikely to encourage the production of world-class literature in South Korea or the dissemination of South Korean literature around the world

2. Vicissitudes of Virtuosity

As tempting as it would be to identify the essence of great literature, the ineluctable reality is that not only do different genres have distinct aesthetic ideals (surely no one would propose the same set of aesthetic criteria to evaluate a novel and a poem) but also virtues and virtuosities of works of art change over time and across cultures. Popular genres and styles rise and fall and even disappear altogether (Moretti, 2007). Greatness or beauty is inevitably a value judgment that perforce reflects the time and the place (as much as many great works of art de transcend the here and the now of their composition or construction). While gurus and pundits pontificated confidently on the indubitable genus of an artist or a masterpiece until recently (see e.g. Clark, 1980; Schmidt, 1985), the contemporary consensus among art or literary critics is precisely to foreswear such universal aesthetic value judgments (see e.g. Eagleton, 1991; Ranciere, 2011).

A few examples should suffice to make my point. Classical Chinese literati tended to value erudition or the knowledge of Chinese characters and classics (cf. Li and Liu, 1984-87). Much the same can be said for early modern European writers whose writings were drenched in Latinate phrases and classical allusions (cf. Curtius, 1948). From a later vantage point, that form of virtuosity seems academic at best and pretentious at worst. Although we remember and mainly read Shakespeare among Elizabethan English writers, his command of "little Latin and less Greek," as Ben Jonson put it, made him very much a popular or plebeian writer in contrast to the learned Philip Sidney or Walter Raleigh, whose leather bound volumes quietly gather dust in library shelves today (Taylor, 1989). If I mention Giovanni Paisiello and Niccolo Piecinnt, I doubt that anyone but an expert in eighteenth-century European music can identify them, who were at least at the time more "classical" and therefore more esteemed and even possibly more popular than Mozart, whom no one cannot but recognize today as musical genius personified (Rosen, 2000), Sidney and Raleigh were great writers, as were Patsiello and Piccinni great musicians, but save for their long deceased contemporaries they seem merely of academic and antiquarian interest. That is, their virtuosity. acknowledged by virtually all their peers, is not something that we can appreciate easily whereas that of Shakespeare or Mozart is much more readily accessible, and their genius something beyond dispute. We can only be puzzled by sixteenth-century elite Londoners who generally preferred Sidney to Shakespeare or eighteenth century cultured Viennese who thought Paisiello better than Mozart, just as they would in turn be baffled by our valorization of Shakespeare or Mozart. My point is that there is no simple set of criteria or values that transcend history and culture.

Another way of articulating my point is to say that virtuosity is perforce specific and there is no universal virtuosity. If I say that the intellectual or creative traits that would make for a great mathematician are not the same as those for a great writer, then I suspect that very few would disagree. We just don't believe in the notion of universal genius: Leonardo da Vinci may have been one, but no one would show much enthusiasm in listening to his musical or poetic composition. Similarly, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Friedrich Nietzsche may have been talented musicians but very few care about their compositions. However, I am saving something more that the impossibility of universal genius the attributes that made Sidney or Paisiello renowned in their lifetime (the mastery of the classical canon and of received rules) are not the same as those that catapulted Shakespeare or Mozart (precisely the ability to supersede the received canon and rules) to fame. Needless to say, the repertoire of talent and skills overlaps over time and across culture but what would make for a literary lion in Choson Korea is surely not the same as that requisite for esteem and renown in twenty-first century South Korea, much less the rest of the world

Let me be more specific. Choson Korean literati valorized classical Chinese virtues: the knowledge of Chinese characters and classics If nothing else, the civil-service examination system (kwago) mandated a mastery of the Chinese-Confucian canon among aspiring Korean elites (Yi et al., 2003). How many South Koreans, much less people outside of the Korean peninsula, can make sense of their writings replete with classical allusions, archaic turns of phrase, and vanished reference whether to people or events? This is especially so given that the South Korean educational system long devalued the teaching of Chinese characters and pupils were more likely to read a Toni Morrison novel than the Analects of Confucius (Lie, 2014). It's not even that contemporary South Koreans have distinct tastes from their literati ancestors; It's that South Koreans today cannot by and large read, much less make sense of, their classical literary heritage. One would almost need a Ph.D. in classical or traditional Korean literature to have ready familiarity with the Korean classical literary canon. What would be the point of making learned allusions to the Chinese classics when so few have inkling of what they are? What hope is there to disseminate a body of writings foreign to South Koreans themselves beyond the Korean peninsula?

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(continued...)
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(Part 2 of 4, "South Korean literature in the age of the Korean Wave," by John Lie, 2013.)

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[...] What hope is there to disseminate a body of writings foreign to South Koreans themselves beyond the Korean peninsula?

In short, it is very difficult, if not impossible, for Korean writings embedded in the classical canon to make sense of their literary virtuosity to their co-nationals and therefore to global readership. And I would argue the same for everyone outside of the Western canon, however attenuated it may be, of Homer, Virgil, the Bible, Dante, Shakespeare, perhaps great nineteenth century realist novelists. Russian masters, and perhaps some others (cf. Eliot. 1953: Bloom. 1994). What disseminates in the realm of world literature draws preponderantly on the Western canon. This is true not only in terms of paradigmatic authors and master works, but also of literary genres, conventions, tropes, and styles. The very horizon of allusions and conventions that make something a work of literature is deeply drenched in the flow of Western literary traditions. One might argue that there are authors from the non-European world let us include the United States in the ambit of the European world who are nonetheless read widely and avidly around the world: Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortazar or Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel Garcia Márquez in Latin America, Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe from Anglophone Africa or Aime Césaire or Leopold Sédar Senghor from Francophone Africa. Yet they are all deeply influenced by -- and in many ways write within the ambit of -- one of the European literary traditions. It is precisely their familiarity with Western literary conventions that allow these works in turn to be accessible to readers who were formed by similar literary conventions and tastes. Writing and reading outside of the familiar terrain make them not only unfamiliar and foreign but very often unfathomable and inaccessible. In this regard, Japanese writers who have garnered wide readership in the West -- such as the two Nobel laureates, Kawabata Yasunari and De Kenzaburo, or Mishima Yukio and Murakami Haruki -- were widely read in European and American literature and wrote in ways that were in turn accessible to Western readers. Indeed, there is a sense in which the genealogy of modern Japanese literature is perforce non nationalist: it is not so much The Tale of Genji (Genji Monogatari) that these writers were influenced by and sought to emulate but rather great French, Russian, and other Western writers (see e.g. Okada, 2003).

Put simply, literature -- and even the conception of world literature -- is basically synonymous with European literary tradition and Influence. To speak of literature is largely to speak of Eurocentric literature, those outside of its ambit and influence are consigned to distinct realms, such as what used to be called "Orientalism." The same impulse generates a ready identification of music with European music; the study of non-European music becomes a distinct discipline, or at least a marginal subfield, called ethnomusicology. The modern world is, in spite of recent historical efforts to recuperate non Western populations (e.g. Wolf, 1982, Bayly, 2003), profoundly Western in conception and constitution (cf. Lie, 2004). The recently fashionable teaching of "world literature" therefore elides the existence of distinct literary traditions: world literatures (Apter, 2013). Paradoxically but predictably, the situation is often even more Eurocentric in the non-Western world, including South Korea Something of internalized colonialism -- at times conscious but more often unconscious sense of cultural inferiority -- reigns in the realm of culture in many parts of the non-Western world, perhaps most strikingly in those areas that have largely succeeded in "catching up" with the West.

As the canon of great Western literature was largely formed during the past century or two in the West (and other affluent countries), it was basically the product of a new democratic, common reading public that emerged in England and elsewhere (Altick, 1957), We have in OECD countries dwindling but still vibrant cultures of reader ship. They may occasionally read utterly exotic works of literature but the reality is that virtually all the best-sellers, even in the realm of literary fiction, are those address the lives of affluent, democratic countries: their triumphs and tragedies. Kawabata, Mishima, Oe, and Murakami -- however they may locate their fiction in Japan and play exotic notes of Japanese culture and society -- depict a fundamentally modern, or at least modernizing, society that is legible for OECD based readers. To the extent that they are legible and comprehensible, notes of exoticism merely add allure to those who wish to explore another world: different enough to be interesting but similar enough to be understandable. In the genre of mystery in particular, there is a vibrant subgenre of international mystery. The conventions of characters and plots tend to be the same but local colors add mightily to their appeal: sort of literary tourism. Think only of the spectacular global sales of the works of Stieg Larsson or Jo Nesbo.

In summary, a critical condition of possibility of worldwide dissemination is some sort of an engagement with the literary conventions of the globalized literary marketplace: to have at least a passing familiarity with Western literary traditions and conventions as well as to presume a mode of social life that is recognizable for those inhabiting OECD countries (though exoticism, like adventure travel, has its place). Put differently, cultural membership in the Western-dominated global literary canon and culture and social belonging in the Western-led global mass culture. Quite clearly, classical and post-classical Chinese inflected Korean literature can occupy at best a marginal place. That brings me to my second point.

3. Form versus Substance

Consider Murakami Haruki, perhaps the most popular among serious writers in the world today. What is striking about Murakami's work is the almost universal opprobrium he receives from scholars of Japanese literature. To summarize, their complaint centers on his work not being part of Japanese literature or not being really Japanese at all (Richard, 2012). His writing is said to read like translation, perhaps appropriately so for a renowned translator of contemporary American fiction into Japanese. That his prose owes more to F. Scott Fitzgerald and Raymond Carver than to Kawabata or Mishima seems to annoy them as much as that his characters and plots could very well be transposed to any OECD country in a globalized, homogenizing world ef. Kawamura, 2006). In spite of recent turn to things Japanese. Murakami's work is likely to allude to Western literature, music, food. If not taking place in the West, whether Norway or Finland. Which of course may precisely be the reason that his novels are so popular they often depict alienated and anomic characters in search of love and meaning in a cold and indifferent metropolis. Call it postmodem or postindustrial, cosmopolitan or contemporary, Murakami's work often resonates with the lives and the times of college educated, largely urban, and predominantly affluent societies. One may very well find this situation in Tokyo or Taipei, Paris or Prague, San Francisco or Santiago. Not coincidentally, Murakami's novels sell well in all these cities and countries, including of course Seoul and South Korea.

If a particular form that is denuded of substance (tradition and culture) is a crucial key to global popularity, then it may very well account in part for the success of the Korean Wave. Consider in this regard Kyoul yonga [Winter Sonata], which was the breakout success for South Korean television drama in the early 2000s, especially in Japan (Mori, 2004). What is remarkable about the soap opera is that it is almost completely devoid of any Korean content. Twenty one-hour episodes later, an alert viewer will see many beautiful scenes and the ups and downs of the three major and attractive characters but she will not see a single scene of them eating Korean food, wearing Korean clothes, or engaging in traditional Korean rituals. They may sip coffee in sophisticated cafés and eat pasta in a trendy restaurant or wear fashionable sweaters to go skiing or sport haut couture to discuss studying architecture in France but we don't see much that is idiosyncratically or identifiably Korean. The home base of Chunchon may be an exception but it proves the general rule: we don't see anything that remotely suggests the contemporary reality of the city, such as the large U.S. military presence that was well-nigh inescapable in the characters' youth and even in their adulthood they have disappeared now). For that matter, neither of the two leading male protagonists seems a bit concerned about military conscription, university entrance examination, or other near universal obsessions of South Korean youths (cf. Abelmann et al., 2012), The casual viewer might be excused for thinking that South Korea is a land of laid-back gentlemen and gallant, post-feminist men. I hope I am not making unwarranted generalizations about South Korea in the early 2010s when I say that most South Koreans eat Korean food or that there is a persistence of patriarchal, male-centric mindset and behavior (see eg. Moon, 2005 Chong, 2008). Almost all viewers know that the soap opera takes place in South Korea and attribute all sorts of Koreanness to characters and scenes (e.g. Takayanagi and Iwamoto, 2006), but they are all superficial and could easily have been transposed to any number of OECD countries. More generally, the world of Winter Sonata is at best a beautified version of South Korea, if not an outright fabrication. The expunction of the local makes for a good fantasy and fairy tale but one cannot then say that it is substantively or representatively Korean.

Undoubtedly fans of South Korean television drama would point to series with substantive Korean content, such as Taejanggum (Dae Jang Geum). There is no question that there are television shows that are geared for purely local (Korean) consumption and those that appeal to neighboring Asian countries with shared sensibilities and legacies. The pan-Asian appeal of Taejanggum is a calculated gesture, and again I would stress the elision of substance. Taejanggum is a kinder and gentler revision of the premodern reality of status and gender hierarchy. It is a narrative that combines romantic love -- the sine qua non of melodrama -- and individual social mobility. Any romantic love drama worth watching rests critically on being true to the Shakespearean Insight that the course of true love never does run smoothly fat least true love that is worthy of dramatic depiction). Without overcoming status or caste barriers, the love that is destiny cannot meet the simple Shakespearan criterion of true love and more importantly be of any interest to viewers (melodrama eschews the straight and the short). We must also forget the rather sordid reality of premodern Korean gender relations and strong status hierarchy and discrimination. Premodern Korea provides a nice historical backdrop. an occasional for an extended costume drama but the story is essentially a modern, romantic one transposed to an exotic locale and distant, airbrushed past. Beyond all the exotic costumes and settings lay a story that could take place virtually anywhere and anytime, which is precisely part of its extra-national appeal.

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(continued....)

(Part 3 of 4, "South Korean literature in the age of the Korean Wave," by John Lie, 2013.)

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[...] Beyond all the exotic costumes and settings lay a story that could take place virtually anywhere and anytime, which is precisely part of its extra-national appeal.

Much the same can be said about K-pop. Almost all the groups have vaguely English-sounding names and the lyrics are studded with English or Globish phrases. The lyrical contents are almost always about romantic love and other universal themes, betraying almost nothing of local Korean color and context. The music itself owes nothing to traditional Korean music [kugak] and is indistinguishable from any globally popular music. Not surprisingly, we don't hear classical Korean instruments or traditional vocalizing techniques K-pop is basically Western -- predominantly American -- pop music Even the singers themselves -- several groups have non-Koreans to hone their extra-Korean appeal -- seem to deviate from traditional Korean facial and body type or at least they are taller and thinner. paler and shapelier versions of people I think of as Koreans. The prevalence of plastic surgery -- long pilloried for its anti-Confucian implication of defiling the gift from one's parents -- merely completes the extra-Korean character of K-pop (Lie, 2012, 2014).

Successful South Korean cultural exports, such as television dramas and popular music, are almost completely denuded of substantive Korean content. In this regard, they are more like Hyundai cars or Samsung cell phones. No one would claim that either product can be traced to traditional Korean civilization but South Koreans have become very skilled in producing high quality products that have appeal outside of the nation. Similarly, South Koreans have become skilled in generating soap operas and music videos, but we would be remiss to think that they have much to do with Korean tradition and culture. In short, it is the form that has global appeal that is valorized and South Koreans -- through study abroad and other ways of learning from the West -- have become very good at following it, even at times becoming innovative and original. The inevitable consequence is the expunction of local, Korean content or substance. That South Koreans are central in creating Hyundai cars of Samsung phones do not make them part of traditional Korean culture or tradition. Roughly the same situation exists for the South Korean culture industry, such as soap operas and music videos. Perhaps it is fitting for a country that underwent rapid and radical transformations in the past century (Lie, 1998). It would in fact be more surprising to find cultural continuities rather than cultural chasms (Ibid. 2014).

If I am broadly correct thus far, then we can see why most modern Korean novels fail to interest a large readership beyond South Korea. To hazard another broad generalization, modern Korean novels until the twenty-first century tended to valorize substance over form. In post-Liberation South Korea, there was considerable stress placed on the virtuosity of conveying the historical and contemporary reality of the turbulent Korean past and present. Given the highly politicized situation replete with personal and collective tragedies -- consider only Japanese colonization, the Korean War, and military rule -- it would be surprising if we didn't find works dealing with social issues and political problems. Representative in this regard is the South Korean roman-fleuve that would put Romain Rolland or Mikhail Sholokhov to shame, certainly in terms of sheer length. Park Kyong-ni's Toji (Land) (1968-1994) is in the edition I have in 30 volumes whereas Cho Chong-nae's Taebaeksanmaek [Taebaek Mountain Range) (1983-1989) is in 10 volumes. These epics narrate the turbulent history of the Korean peninsula. The highly politicized literary environment in the post-Liberation South Korea valorized, no less than in North Korea, normative discourses that at times verged on the didactic. Even when not explicitly politicized, the underlying atmosphere was of utmost seriousness and sincerity often verging on gloom and doom, despair and depression. The writer was at once a poet maudit and a social realist, a combination that extirpated fun and frivolity. and left little room for the bourgeois luxury of literary formalism or narrative innovation, Put differently, the modal literary production eschewed entertainment and experimentation in favor of seriousness and sincerity. As I said, the South Korean version of roman-fleuve followed fairly conventional narrative techniques that approximated the nineteenth-century European realist novel (cf. Lukács, 1948). That is precisely when Western readership had been captivated by the long legacy of literary modernism, whether by Joyce or Kafka, Proust or Woolf, the vast majority of South Korean writers remained ensconced in the older form and format. The discouragement of formal Innovations merely isolated South Korean novels from the mainline developments in the affluent world. Needless to say. I am making broad generalizations here but I have never encountered a claim that South Korean literature is notable for its formalistic or stylistic innovations Interestingly, some ethnic or diasporic Korean writers -- Anatolii Kim (1984) writing in Russian or Yi Yang-ji (1980) writing in Japanese -- display not only narrative virtuosity but also literary experimentation and innovation, though it would be misleading to generalize these characteristics to all of diasporic Korean literature (see eg. Lie. 2000).

The modest success of Please Look Aflter Mom (Omma rul Putak hae) by Shin Kyung-Sook (Sin Kyong-suk) beyond South Korea illustrates what I have argued. The generic appeal of the narrative impinges on common problems in the affluent West: the rapidly aging population the proliferation of Alzheimer's Disease, the problematic of caring for older people. Just as significantly, the novel is very much a narrative of social mobility that transcends the here and now of contemporary South Korea (Abelmann and Shin, 2012), Seemingly strewn with specific South Korean contents, the novel in fact teeters on being a generic story, a particular form of the contemporary novel. I don't mean to be critical of the novel. Rather. I seek to highlight the condition of possibility of global readership -- or at least what strikes me as the most common modality of becoming part of world literature -- which relies on the expunction, or at least vitiation, of local content in favor of transposable, potentially universal thematic. Needless to say. It is not impossible for a highly local story to gain wide readership but the world republic of letters is dominated by transnational or global literature with common forms and styles that allow high transcultural legibility.

4. The Fickleness of Fortuna and Fama

Even if one should agree about the vicissitudes of virtuosity or the disjuncture between form and substance, one may very well won der about the novelists who have become figures of global renown who are steeped in their localities, such as James Joyce or William Faulkner, Orhan Pamuk or Naguib Mahfouz. Surely it is necessary to understand Dublin, Mississippi, Istanbul, or Cairo to make sense of these celebrated writers' fiction? In part of course they are as feted for their formal innovations and stylistic excellences as much as the depths to which they recreate and reimagine their localities. Yet there is something more at work.

As much as most artistic temperaments would eschew sociological realities, the inescapable fact is that the canon of great literature is ineluctably an ethnocentric construct that the most powerful and wealthy cultures have preponderant influences in shaping it (cf. Guillory, 1995, Said, 2004). This is surely the case of classical China, early modern France, or the twentieth century United States. The sort of works deemed great, whether because of formalistic virtuosity or substantive depth, in these prestigious cultures in turn become objects of wide readership and emulation elsewhere. The inequality in literary influence makes it that a global power, such as the United States, or the previous powerhouses -- the long shadow of French literature, for instance -- dominate the prestige contest, library and bookstore shelves, and literature curricula around the world (see eg. Casanova 19991. The game of world literature is shaped by the reality of wealth and power. Not coincidentally, all the writers I mentioned in the previous paragraph are all heirs to and therefore part of the Western canon.

Literature, to be sure, is more than the superstructure of power and wealth. In literature, as in life, one cannot ignore the place of fortuna and fama. Fortuna is a divinity of fortune who personifies luck in Roman mythology: Fama refers to rumor, reputation, and the like. In spite of the proliferation of advertising, in print or social media, the often acknowledged reality and the basis of literary reputation is the proverbial "word of mouth" the judgment of individual readers who in turn communicate their enthusiasms to fellow readers. This is the bedrock of literary greatness, which must meet the demands of each generation, each culture, each reader. Yet, as is the case with Fortuna who is often depicted as being veiled, there is inevitably randomness and capriciousness in life. Some great writers, such as Faulkner, were neglected, forgotten, and only belatedly rediscovered (cf. Schwartz. 1990).

This is where translation plays a major role. In spite of all the brouhaha about globalization, it is inevitably the case that most readers. even the most literate ones, are comfortable and confident only in their native tongue. There are skilled multilingual readers but save for the rise of global English or Globish, the sort of literacy required for appreciating serious literature is difficult to come by. Polyglot many readers may be, fluentlly reading in literary language requires corisiderable knowledge, something which even culturally sophisticated people only attain in a few languages. If we turn from reading to writing. the imperative of native knowledge and ability is indisputable (as much as there are occasional exceptions). Hence, the nature of translators is in fact far from invisible (Venuti 2008: cf. Berman, 1984). There's a sally that the best-read author of Russian literature in English is Constance Garnett, the indefatigable translator of Tolstoy and Turgenev. Dostoevsky and Chekhov, and many other giants of modern Russian literature (see Garnett, 2009). It is a speculative unanswerable question but would Russian literature have attained a canonical status in the Anglophone world without Constance Garnett? In any case, as The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation pots it: "Translation by people whose native tongue is English, standard for most countries' literature, has always been the exception In Korea" (An, 2000. 249). It may be the case the sheer number of South Koreans who venture to study abroad and become proficient in another language, such as English, paradoxically hampers the quality of South Korean literary translation into other languages as they are preponderantly done by South Korean nationals who are not native writers in English, French, and other languages the main exception is Japan where ethnic Koreans in Japan, who grew up in and therefore are fluent in Japanese, do the lion's share of translating South Korean literature into Japanese). Be that as it may, in spite of the able works of native speakers in English, French, Japanese, and other languages who valiantly translate Korean literature, there is undoubtedly a dearth of translators who are able to render the Korean original into translated versions with great literary flair.

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(continued....)

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(Part 4 of 4, "South Korean literature in the age of the Korean Wave," by John Lie, 2013.)

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[...] [T]here is undoubtedly a dearth of translators who are able to render the Korean original into translated versions with great literary flair.

There are two broad roads from the modal monolingualism of most readers and the necessity of native translators with literary talent. The recent proliferation of global bestsellers suggests the triumph of content-free or at least content-poor fiction. As mentioned, Murakami's novel can easily take place with characters from arry OECD country and certainly there is not much Japanese content that non-Japanese readers must acquire beyond the usual range of global common sense (who doesn't know what sushi is, not that Murakami's characters eat very much of it). Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy and the Harry Potter heptalogy are two cases in point in which local colors imbue exoticism but the narrative relies very little on cultural contents which by and large are familiar to most educated OECD readers. This path promises global sales and reputation but at the expense of any allegiance to literary tradition or stylistic innovation. It is a form of literature in which very little is left after the translation, a counterpoint to considering poetry as what is left after translation.

The alternative is to protect and promote local literary traditions and canons. Although this path may easily lead to hermetic and xenophobic writing, one must take comfort in the voracious and omnivorous character of most innovative writers. Tradition, to recall T.S. Eliot, is what they know and they realize that it is something living and vibrant. It is difficult to say whether the sort of works germinated in this mode of operation would become great global successes, but one must remember that fortune and fame are fickle and capricious, not something that one can chase and achieve except at the cost of losing one's soul, as it were. Whether we think of Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, or James Joyce -- perhaps the three most written about authors of the twentieth century -- they wrote intensively and incisively about what they knew of Prague, Paris, and Dublin. In any case, in the early twenty-first century South Korea, writers are more likely to have read more of the Western canon than the Chinese one or even Korean literature. Yet writers who combine the influence with literary and substantive) virtuosity do exist in substantial numbers in South Korea, whether one thinks of Yi Mun-yol or Yi Sung-u, Han Kang or Kim Ae-ran. They surely deserve readers beyond those who can read the original.

5. Cultural Policy?

Given what I have argued the vicissitudes of virtuosity, the tension and even contradiction between form and substance, and the fickleness of fame there is surely no formulae for literary success. As with most phenomena in the human world, the problem of South Korean literature's relatively low visibility is clearly overdetermined. There is clearly no magic bullet. It is, after all, impossible to state objectively whether there are great South Korean works of literature. I would have to assume that there are, but there remains the problem of audience, not to mention translation The longstanding US-centric perspective in South Korea, for example, may be exacerbating the situation given that North American readers are widely believed to be less open to non-national or non Anglophone literature than readers in Europe Perhaps publishers are at fault or any number of other actors, arbiters, and institutions that constitute the literary world.

It remains unclear, moreover, whether state cultural policy can provide a cure if the situation does in fact need to be remedied). The lessons of literary history bode poorly for state policy or financial subvention that seeks to create great South Korean literature. For it is an unfortunate fact of life that good things like affluence and freedom provide no guarantees for literary greatness. Could Dostoevky have written great novels had he lived in a rich and democratic country. rather than the authoritarian and impoverished (and unequal) country that was Imperial Russia? The same can be asked about the authors have mentioned in this essay. It is repression (Pamuk, for instance) and exile (think of James Joyce) that may be conducive to literary excellence, and not liberty and belonging (see e.g. Treglown, 2013). The South Korean state's cultural policy to bestow prizes and grants -- though I would not argue against arts funding in general -- may be good for writers' lives but I am less certain about whether it would be good for writers' work. In any case, the mandarins -- powerful state bureaucrats and university literature professors -- are notoriously academic; they tend to prefer the Sidneys and the Paisiellos rather than the innovative and the adventurous, who are therefore often deviant and disreputable.

I am more convinced that the potential tragedy of South Korean literature would be precisely to treat it in the same breath as South Korean soap opera or K-pop. It may very well be that globally common themes and styles are what those who wish to attain global circulation should pursue, but they may come at the attenuation of rich literary traditions. Korean literary culture included. For there are formally Innovative and substantially interesting writers -- Yi Sang, for example -- who remain virtually unknown outside of the Korean peninsula, and there are others whose transnational circulation would delight readers around the world. It is precisely the desire for quick results and global renown that may bypass past great writers or squelch the creative and original work of contemporary South Korean writers. We should not forget that the powers that be have historically rarely liked the great writers in their midst. Be that as it may, as Sirach suggested. The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong... but time and chance happen to them all." Best to encourage writers to do the best they can, rather than pointing to the mammon of wealth or trying to tame the fickleness of fame.

More strikingly, there is the disturbing possibility that the very problematic of this paper may be misplaced. That is, the trouble with South Korean literature may not be so much about what I have discussed here but it may be more about a larger cultural change The explosive popularity of the Internet and social media and the nature of compulsory and competitive schooling that devalues free time and therefore autonomous reading seem to be corroding the once widespread practice of reading books, including serious fiction, in South Korea. The culture of reading literary fiction and perhaps reading books tout court, more so than in other OECD countries, seems to be in steady decline in contemporary South Korea (Abrams, 2013). The decline of reading literature may in turn lead to the decline of aspiring writers and therefore to the generalized crisis of South Korean literature. All this is speculative, but we cannot discount the possibility that the culture of reading literature -- and more broadly the civilization that books built or the Age of Gutenberg -- may be entering a period of terminal decline (cf. Nunberg, 1990 Birkerts, 2006). Reading itself will surely survive in various media but it seems increasingly unlikely that serious literary fiction -- and the culture of reading and Bildung -- will continue to occupy a central place in South Korea or indeed anywhere else. Perhaps it is appropriate, then, that in a country that continues to be dedicated to creative destruction, including the culture industry, should generate the Korean Wave without South Korean literature.

[End of article.]

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(Part 4 of 4, "South Korean literature in the age of the Korean Wave," by John Lie, in Korea Observer, Winter 2013-14.)

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This is a very interesting essay (ending on a stunningly depressing note about the future of a literary public); thank you for sharing!

I am very curious about your thoughts on the continued relevance on this essay post 2020 with the rise of international interest in Korean literature, especially the choice of International Booker Awards. I wonder if you think the current global rise of Korean literature still requires this warning: "It is precisely the desire for quick results and global renown that may bypass past great writers or squelch the creative and original work of contemporary South Korean writers."

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Julia: Thanks for writing! I'd like to hear your own answer to the same question you posed.

To me John Lie's commentary-essay from 2013 is relevant in the 2020s for two main reasons:

(1.) On the timeline of the rise of Korean literature-in-translation. It starts beginning around the mid- or late-2010s (and what this means for the phenomenon in the 2020s); and

(2.) On the evergreen question of how South Korean culture-producers (and their promoters) engage with the rest of the world. Is Korean literature distorting itself to try to grab fame and acclaim (and money) in the international Western-language market(s)?

The second point remains relevant in the 2020s and, I'd guess, beyond. The first I think is still relevant indirectly.

John Lie, late 2013:
"It is precisely the desire for quick results and global renown that may bypass...[or] squelch the creative and original work of contemporary South Korean writers"

He was using this point as a support for his claim that Korean literature had failed to gain an audience outside Korea. But the observation still applies even if/when Korean literature-in-translation is successful. It's a question not of success but of quality and authenticity.

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More thoughts on the recency of the Korean literature-in-translation phenomenon: The John Lie essay of 2013 on Korean literature is a valuable signpost showing how obscure Korean literature was seen to be outside Korea, back in the 2000s and (most of) the 2010s.

Lots of newcomers, and people born after year 2000 or so, may well be unaware that Korean literature-in-translation was not always the relatively big deal it is today. It had a trajectory from obscurity to success in very-recent memory.

Why is this relevant in the 2020s? It's here now, just accept it and engage with it, get what you can from it, I hear people saying. But our (highly imperfect) attempts at "appreciating literature" are interested in the recent past and where things come from.

We are interested in something like, What an author is up to; and, beyond a ingle author, what a literary tradition or tendency up to (in which an author is working at a given time); where does a literary tradition come from, where does it seek to go, who's doing it, why, when --

Actually, all the usual journalistic "who/what/when/where/why/how" questions can be probed, often on multiple facets for each one. (How many of these questions get distorted from influence or feedback-loops from foreign markets and acclaim?)

John Lie's kind of commentary is on Korean literature-in-translation is of value to the "When." We read him so confidently saying in late 2013, that Korean literature had gone nowhere internationally. (The essay is also peppered with indirect answers or suggestions to the other 'W' questions; I'll come back to that.)

Koreans have been producing modern literature for over a century. But in terms of the Korean literature-in-translation market, it's something without much of a past. (I've argued somewhere else around these pages that Korean literature still held at a low level, far below Korea's otherwise cultural output, even as the 2010s drew to a close, even though real signs of upswing were clear by then, it still was a long ways to go.)

One of the most common phrases or notions I've seen in reviews of Korean literature-in-translation here at GoodReads is: "Oh, wow! This is the first time I'd ever heard of ______!" Korean literature being absent from the scene for almost everyone, before sometime around 2020, allows this kind of reaction.

Koreans themselves, especially those raised in Korea, will generally not have that kind of reaction ("Wow, I'd never heard of _____ in my life, but I find it fascinating"-type of responses).

The problem is: if all literature is "inter-textual," Western readers coming into Korean literature will have a different experience as they lack knowledge of the other "texts" (literal and metaphorical).

__________

The "when" question is loaded with lots of meaning: Why was Korean literature underperfoming abroad before around the late 2010s? Why did it start to gain in popularity around then, years after the identifiable beginnings of success-trajectories for other branches of the K-Culture phenomenon (music, movies, tv-dramas, food...).

One useful way to gauge opinion on the "Why," and from there some of the other "W"-questions, is to ask about first-ever encounters with Korean literature. I can say my own:

Around late 2012 (I cannot remember exactly, but not earlier than fall 2011 and not later than summer 2013), while living near Seoul, I found and bought a copy of Your Republic Is Calling You by Young-ha Kim.

I remember enjoying Your Republic is Calling You and thinking it worthwhile. I also distinctly remember a feeling of almost pity for the poor text, one of the few Korean novels-in-translation then being sold anywhere. There was no expectation, no feeling in the air , that I could tell, that there'd be a major rise in popularity of Korean literature. That was 2012. Someone in much my position a short eight years later would likely have a different impression.

(By the way, this Korean Literature Club was active already in 2012, but back then was dealing exclusively in classics. For one thing, there weren't really enough new titles coming out per year to fill out a one-a-month schedule!)

The point I've been trying to drive towards is:

There is no easy separation of the Korean literature-in-translation phenomenon as we see it in the 2020s from the "recency" of the entire genre. (Can all works of fiction translated from a specific language be called a genre? Better: a "meta-genre"). Having a knowledgable commentator walk us through it, as with John Lie's 2013 essay, I find valuable even in the 2020s.

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(2.) Was John Lie "wrong" in saying literature was "not part of the Korean Wave"? That is, did future events refute him?

And was he making the claim that Korean literature-in-translation was doomed to continued failure?

He touched on evergreen tendencies with which Korean culture-producers and their promoters interact with the rest of the world, especially Western/English-reading audiences. These tendencies remain. They are not refuted by the post-2020 (or so) success of Korean literature in the West; but they can be reinterpreted and reapplied.

Returning to the quote:

"It is precisely the desire for quick results and global renown that may bypass...[or] squelch the creative and original work of contemporary South Korean writers"

I note that these days, some major international publishers are giving Korean author-translator pairs contracts and publishing dual editions as part of one contract. Is there any way such a system doesn't eventually cause some distortions of literary output?

I really noticed this tendency with the recent healing-fiction novel The Rainfall Market (original, June 2023; English translation, Nov 2024). The Korean-original edition, even in its first edition, as I recall, boasted to Korean domestic consumers of how the book had secured an international translation-deal with Penguin.

Success. Isn't is a matter of taste? And subject to possible manipulation from interested parties? We as readers (and perhaps as "Korea Watchers") should be aware of, and might be wary of, some of these tendencies if they tend toward degrading or de-authenticizing literary output. That was what John Lie foresaw. (But it begs questions of what Korean authenticity means; especially given that the novel and short-story forms are adapted from the West. No time to go in that direction now.)

This healing-fiction genre, now associated with Korean writing. It is not in the main-line of Korean literature. It did not exist yet in the early 2010s. But in the mid-2020s, healing fiction is hugely prominent in Korean literature-in-translation. A total newcomer could be forgiven for thinking Korean literature is, on the main, similarly warm and fluffy (the reality is that it's traditionally more like the very opposite).

(Healing Fiction was picked up and refined by Korean authors in the early 2020s, who've gone far with it; but it's said to have originated in Japan in about the mid-2010s; that is, in the form we now recognize it. Koreans, who went further and did better with it, are more associated with it now, I think.)

Science Fiction is another trend evident in the early-mid 2020s in Korean literature, and now increasingly seen in Korean literature-in-translation.

That genre in Korea was almost completely absent in 2015 and just peeking over the horizon in 2020. But the vigor with which translation-publishers have latched on, is notable and not missed by Korean would-be authors.

My suspicion is that strong winds blowing in from abroad helped push the genre forward; once people saw the translated-literature market's potential and the ongoing strength of the K-Culture wave and so forth. In some cases, some of these science-fiction novels could be examples of what John Lie identified in 2013.

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Let me also add this, on that "stunningly depressing note" that ends the essay:

John Lie wrote:

[W]e cannot discount the possibility that the culture of reading literature -- and more broadly the civilization that books built or the Age of Gutenberg -- may be entering a period of terminal decline [...] Reading itself will surely survive in various media but it seems increasingly unlikely that serious literary fiction -- and the culture of reading and Bildung -- will continue to occupy a central place in South Korea or indeed anywhere else.

I have a feeling John Lie just ended the essay there not because he wanted to stress this point, but because he had to end it somehow and this was a common "trope" at the time. He had already done this whirlwind tour of the landscape of the then-not-selfconfident world of Korean literature-in-translation and the frustrated attempts by the Korean side to promote their writers abroad. How to end it?

It was a common thing to hear back in the early 2010s: That reading, especially of paper books, was in terminal decline; that digital things would dominate. I remember it well. The confident predictions that no one would be using paper-books by now (the mid-2020s).

And yet the predictions were wrong: paper-books remains the main way people read literature. That's borne out by data I've seen but also anecdotally. Among dozens of participants in this Club, meeting in person in Seoul, I see far more paper-books than digital versions.

Here's another one: Inearly May of 2025, many members of this Club attended a book-launch for Red Sword by Bora Chung, at a venue in Hongdae, Seoul. The place was overflowing with an over-capacity crowd (which I recall frightened the girl running the front-desk). (See event-report: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...).

A funny thing, now that I think of it: most attendees bought paper copies of the book. I recall no mention by anyone of digital copies or ebooks!

Of course lots of people will read Red Sword in digital form (although it's getting rated a lot lower than other works by Bora Chung). But those who turned out for the book-launch all took home paper copies. To think back on it, it seems something significant.

The rumors of reading's terminal decline, and literary culture's decline along with it, have faded away. Ebooks never replaced paper-books, even if digital distractions did proliferate to a disturbing degree.
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I confess I skimmed most of this but as to why Korean literature underperformed abroad I don't know but I mentioned in another thread somewhere that Korean literature has also underperformed domestically too. at least for the period of time I could find information about, Japanese authors far outsold Korean authors.