Faculty & Staff
Faculty
Jongyon Hwang
Professor of Korean Literature in East Asian Languages and Civilizations
Cl 411
773-702-1255
Teaching/Research Interests
Modern Korean literature, intellectual history, and art history; comparative study of modern Japanese and Korean literature and criticism.
Before joining the University of Chicago faculty in 2009, I taught modern Korean fiction and criticism at Dongguk University in Seoul. My previous work has focused on the formation of literary and cultural modernity in Korea, drawing upon the ways in which concepts and ideas travelled across various cultures in East Asia and the West. My current research broadly deals with the cultural meanings of Korean nationalism as constructed and articulated in literature, art, archeology, and historiography; at the present I explore Korean and Japanese representations of Silla, an ancient Kingdom of Korea, whose history and culture served as a prime object for ‘Korean studies’ in its formative years while offering a repertoire of Korean cultural identities since Japanese colonial rule. Aside from this line of research, I have ongoing projects on contemporary Korean literature, addressing critical and theoretical issues such as democratization, cultural populism, women’s writing, subcultural aesthetics, and post-nationalism.
Selected Publications
- “Jukyō no kyōyū kara tōyō no koto e: keishū no shokuminchiteki saikūkanka (From a Confucian Town to an Old Oriental City: Colonial Re-spatialization of Kyŏngju),” Chōsen Gakuhō (2009, forthcoming)
- (ed.) Sila ŭi palkyŏn (The Invention of Silla), (Seoul: Tonggukdae ch’ulpanbu, 2008)
- “Chōsen seinen eriito no kōkoku shinmin aidentiti no zuikō (The Korean Young Elites’s Performing of the Identity of Imperial Subjectivity)” Komori Yōichi, et, al., ed., Higashi ajia rekishi ninshiki ronsō no metahisutori (A Metahistory of the Dispute over the Understanding of East Asian history), (Tokyo: Seikyūsha, 2008)
- “In the Wake of Apocalypse of Literature: On Karatani Kojin’s Thesis on the End of Modern Literature,” Korea Journal 47:1, 2007
- “The Heartless (Yi Kwangsu, Korea 1917),” in Franco Moretti ed., The Novel vol. 1 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006)
- “The Story of the Novel in Korea: A Modern Episode,” Korea Journal 45:3, 2005
- Piruhan kŏt ŭi kanibal (A Carnival of the Abjects) (Seoul: Munhakdongne, 2001)
- “The Emergence of Aesthetic Ideology in Modern Korean Literary Criticism," Korea Journal 39:4, 1999.
