This Cosmopolitan Culture of Ours: A Chosŏn Scholar’s Dramatic Imagineering

• In Event: Signifiers in Motion: The Transmutation of Chinese Texts in Early Modern East Asia

Abstract

In a self-preface to his mid-nineteenth-century dramatic composition The Northern Chamber (Puksang ki), the Chosŏn scholar Tongo Ŏch’o incriminated himself as one member of a league of aspiring authors who failed to produce writings that carried the moral imperative of the Confucian discourse of orthodoxy—“This Culture of Ours” 斯文. Yet, the author maintains, by writing in the form of a play studded with witty remarks, his text will engender among later writers exactly the same anxiety of overwhelming inadequacy that “This Culture of Ours” creates for him. Such a claim not only presents The Northern Chamber as the dramatic equivalent of “This Culture of Ours,” but also modifies the effectuation of this loaded term in literature—from the loftiness of its moral message and the exquisiteness of verbal patterning to the exhilarating effect his text instigates in every crevice of social life. In this closet play modeled after chuanqi drama that flourished in seventeenth-century China, the author stages a range of scenes that clearly find their inspiration in books imported from China: The Western Chamber, Plum in the Golden Vase, and miscellanies featuring canonical texts from the Confucian classics, repartee, drinking games, and riddles. By mixing high and low modes of literary genres in ways that expand the possibilities of interpreting established cultural symbols, Tongo Ŏch’o presents his book as a vicarious enactment of this cosmopolitan “Culture of Ours.”

Author

• Xiaoqiao Ling, Arizona State University