Fact or Fiction? Engagements with Scientific Discourse in Popular, Critical, and Literary Texts of Colonial and Postcolonial Korea

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

This panel proposes to examine the relationship between cultural production and the discourse of practice of science in modern Korea. The assembled papers consider representations of science, often for popular consumption, across a variety of periods, political contexts, and media: in the literary criticism of the colonial 1930s; in the popular periodicals of the 1950s-60s; and in the science fiction of North and South Korea. The panel as a whole aims to think about the ways in which critical, literary, and popular texts have contended with science across the twentieth century and into the present, and the papers demonstrate how science relies on narrative practices, both textual and visual, in order to shape and guide the very projects that it proposes to describe. Reflecting the panelists’ diversity of perspectives and backgrounds, the papers bridge the disciplines of science and technology studies, literary and cultural studies, and the history of science. At the same time, each paper understands the scientific as implicated by social and political discourses, and together they describe how science is imagined and represented by both state and non-state actors, as well as consider the consequences of these representations. The papers cohere in questioning the relationship between science and politics as well as the conventional separation between the scientific and the social, and—particularly given the oft-noted and strong connection between literature and political engagement in the Korean and East Asian context—focus on popular culture as an important ground on which this separation is challenged.

Area of Study

• Korea

Session Organizer

• Dafna Zur, Stanford University

Individual Presentations

• The Early Formation of South Korea’s Sociotechnical Imaginary: Sassangye and the Shifting Narratives of Science and Technology in the 1950s and 1960s - Sang-Hyun Kim, Hanyang University

• "The Fact of the Poem": Scientific Thinking and the Literary Text in Colonial Korea - Christopher P. Hanscom, University of California, Los Angeles

• Science Fiction in South and North Korea - Dong-Won Kim, Harvard University

• The Story of Data: Fictionalizing Science in Postwar North and South Korea - Dafna Zur, Stanford University

Discussant

• Theodore Hughes, Columbia University