Recasting Material Culture in Pre-Modern Korean Literature

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

Recent scholarship in pre-modern Korean literature has paid increased attention to the material culture as integral to literary practices, and many texts hitherto considered non-literary became subjects of literary studies. In particular, social and cultural spaces linking marketplace to literati studios have emerged as a site of inquiry into literary culture. This panel explores writings on objects through examples from the Three Kingdoms period to the late eighteenth century in Korea: wooden tablets of ephemera from Silla, horticultural compendia from early Choson, tobacco-smoking featured in late Choson poetry and painting, and the manuals on breeding ornamental birds. Drawing insights from disciplines such as art history and archeology, we ask: what do writings about things inform literary and intellectual discourses?

Marjorie Burge examines disposability of wooden tablets in comparison to the monumentality of stone steles to discuss the transition from script culture to literary culture during the Three Kingdoms period. Jongmook Lee shows how the essays in the horticulture compendia from the early Choson period align knowledge of the natural world with the Confucian discourse on the cultivation of the mind. Daehoe Ahn traces the permutation of the subject of tobacco and smoking in late Choson poetry and painting and discusses how the foreign stuff came to figure desire, social tension, and emotion of Choson people. Min Jung locates the books on ornamental birds in the eighteenth-century intellectual milieu, noting a shift from wariness against ornaments of the literati culture as material attachments to their valorization as subjects worthy of investigation.

Area of Study

• Korea

Session Organizer

• Jiwon Shin, Arizona State University

Chair

• Jongmook Lee, Seoul National University

Individual Presentations

• From Script Culture to Literary Culture: Wooden Tablets from the Unified Silla - Marjorie Burge, University of California, Berkeley

• Investigation of Things through Floriculture during the Choson Period - Jongmook Lee, Seoul National University

• Exteriorizing Urban Sentiment: Tobacco and Smoking in Late Choson Poetry and Painting - Daehoe Ahn, Sungkyunkwan University

• Keeping Ornamental Birds in Eighteenth-Century Choson - Min Jung, Hanyang University

Discussant

• Jiwon Shin, Arizona State University