Translated encounters and empire: Colonial Korea and the literature of exile

This dissertation considers the shifting location of "Korean literature" in late-colonial Korea (1931-45) in the expanding Japanese empire by focusing on the rise of Japanese-language literature by Koreans penned at the colonial "contact zones." These uncanny writings have been roiled in controversy and were relegated to the margins of postcolonial national literary histories of both Korea and Japan, rigorously avoided for the traumatic traces of colonial and wartime memories they evoke. If they are considered at all, they are scrutinized for traces of "resistance" or "collaboration" vis-à-vis the colonial state, to be redeemed or valorized along standards of the (post-) colonial nation. My point of departure is to complicate this oft-read binary to consider the colonial "conundrum of representation" embodied in these texts, which were produced in conditions of colonial modernity, between censorship and propaganda, between resistance and collaboration, and between colonial and national boundaries, in order to reconsider these pained and painful texts which defy easy categories.;What I mean by the "conundrum of representation" is a deliberate play on the literary trope of the "crisis of representation," familiar in the modern(ist) Western canon translated and defamiliarized beyond any putative claims to "formal aestheticism" and "universality," which were ironically based on perspectives particular to the political agendas of metropolitan centers. My concern in evoking such translated terms, however, is not with locating a corresponding claim to universality in other texts thus far marginalized, but rather with the particular and politicized conundrum of "representing the colonized," the very lack of which in the familiar modern Western canon exposes the lack of legitimacy of such canonical (or any) claims to "universality." I situate the texts I consider in the specific historical context in which they emerged, and by reading the uncanny moments of convergence and divergence with metropolitan and national canonical tropes, I attempt to question the canonicity of imperial and national literatures, the binary of universalism and particularism, the boundaries of the metropole and the colony, and other exclusionary terms used in ordering our world experiences.