Korean Modernism at the Margin: Visualizing Affect, Body, and Exteriority in Modern Literature and Film

My dissertation engages the socio-political trajectory of Korean modernism and addresses key moments of Korean modern history including the colonial period, the postwar era of urban modernization, and the contemporary era of global capitalism. Considering modernist texts as the problematic site where history, aesthetics, and politics juxtapose, the purpose of my project is to address the disruptive nature of the modern experience, especially concerning the affective, visual, and spatial fluctuation of modern subjectivity. Also, my study of modernism is an attempt to expand the critical boundaries of Korean modernism and introduce a critical language beyond the dichotomy between realism and modernism, which has contaminated literary and filmic discourses in Korea.;My project examines four tropes of modernist aesthetics: the affect of self-reflexivity, corporeal allegories of violence, mournful landscapes and sublime aesthetics. Each chapter deals with specific problems and debates regarding the experience of modernity and illuminates how Korean modernism constructs and deconstructs the boundaries of the self, body, space, and affectivity in the radical rupture of modern history of Korea. In the first chapter, I investigate the affective mode of the colonial self-reflexivity through the comparative analysis of modernist writer Yi Sang's Mirror poems and the 1941 film, Spring of Korean Peninsula directed by Yi Pyoˇng-il. In following two chapters, I read the early 1960s Korean film noir and the late 1960s modernist films adapted from literary work in order to speculate on the way Korean modernism fragments the total unity of institutionalized history often imposed by nationalist discourses. In the fourth chapter, I trace the modernist impulses in the work of a contemporary Korean director, Park Chan-wook. By focusing on Park's aesthetic inquiry for the mode of limit and exteriority in his recent film, Thirst, I argue that his work present the sublime of local culture to be touched, reached, and felt in the neoliberal world of global capitalism. Through these examinations of modern literature and films in Korea, I argue that Korean modernism articulates the politics of the margins, debunks the ahistorical and apolitical myth of `art for art's sake,' and addresses the liminal experiences of living in the hiatus of modern temporality.