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Korean Literature Association 2024 Annual Conference

 

Act! Performativity of Korean Literature

 

The Korean Literature Association cordially invites proposals for its annual meeting on the theme of “Performativity of Korean Literature” to be held at The Ohio State University, October 11-12, 2024. We invite individual papers and organized panels that approach this theme from multiple perspectives, using methodologies from literary theory, linguistics, gender studies, critical race theory, cultural studies, performance studies, and history, and explore how these interdisciplinary approaches can open up new ways of thinking about Korean literature.

 

While performance is a deeply contested concept, the organizers of this conference use this term to refer primarily to three major lines of inquiry in thinking about Korean literature.

 

First, it refers to the analysis of a range of explicitly artistic performances, examining their aesthetic, social, and political significance in documenting and transforming Korean society. Examples include theater, dance, music, visual art, sound art, and performance art that speak to specific historical moments in Korean history and offer poignant artistic or social commentary. 

 

Second, we also use performance to examine what it means to approach literature, social phenomena, or everyday human behavior as performance, that is, to use performance as a framework for thinking through literature, social phenomena, and human behavior. By exploring the significance of embodied and affective expressions in these phenomena, and by delving into the representational nature of modes of expression, we aim to undo the false bifurcation between text and the body.

 

Finally, it means using performance to generate a new research inquiry, foregrounding the body or human sensorium as a way to produce new knowledge beyond what is stored in traditional, text-centered archives. By tapping new sources of research from muscle memory, lived experience, bodily intelligence, gestural practices, and others, we seek to produce more robust knowledge about human agency and creativity.

 

Topics may include, but are not limited to, the following:

 

●     Intermediality of Korean literature, theatre, dance, music, visual art, sound art, and performance art

●     Performed texts: theatre script, screenplay, song lyrics, dramatic reading, podcast

●     Poetry in performance: recitation, slam poetry, rap and hip-hop

●     Traditions of oral literature and their modern revival

●     Revisiting the debate between ‘pure’ literature and ‘committed’ literature in the twentieth century

●     Literature as an interruption in the quotidian or an intervention into the political

●     Texts that thrive on the physicality of the body, that make the disappeared visible, or that make the ghosts return

●     Heteronormativity and racism reflected and/or resisted in Korean literature

●     Literatures of Korean diaspora and their world-making

 

The KLA (https://koreanlit.org/) welcomes submissions from graduate students, faculty, and independent scholars at any stage of their careers who are interested in presenting papers at the Conference. While the official conference language is English, we will also be open to Korean-language presentations of innovative research. We are currently planning an in-person conference at The Ohio State University’s Columbus Campus, with possible optional hybrid presentations in cases where travel poses difficulties. To apply, please send your CV and a 300-word abstract to korlitorg@gmail.com. A panel proposal should include the individual abstracts along with a 300-word panel abstract. Those selected to present will be required to submit a presentation paper in advance.

 

All participants in the conference and the workshop will be required to register as KLA members and will receive hotel accommodation. All efforts will be made to defray the cost of travel especially for junior scholars. The deadline for submissions is April 5, 2024. If you have any questions, please contact the local organizer, Pil Ho Kim, at kim.2736@osu.edu.