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Call for Papers: Korean Literature Association 2025 Annual Conference
October 31–November 1, 2025 at Emory University
Korean Literary Studies in Transtemporal Turn
Modern physics has shown that the passage of time varies depending on its relationship with the nearby masses, which we call time distortion. That is, time is not an absolute metric that unifies all incidents and chronologies but a medium for disagreement. Likewise, every practice of cultural production and its circulation reveals a distinctive sense of time, whether the relationship among the past, present, and future or the temporal scales in which they operate. The issue of time figures prominently in our understanding about the world and our self-identities formed in it.
To join the recent attention to the “transtemporal turn” in literary studies, this year’s KLA annual conference calls for papers that critically ruminate on time, temporality, and temporal scale to shed new light on Korean literature and its related fields.
Inspired by what literary critic Wai Chee Dimock calls the “deep-time reading habit,” we call into question linear temporality and conventional periodization linked to the area studies epistemology, which has also affected how Korean literary and cultural studies developed. Some past events keep coming back to the present, which subsequently becomes our most recent past while shaping our future. To quote William Faulkner, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Likewise, our imagination about the future affects how we process the past in the present, coordinating our memories with our imagination about them and even some speculation. In a similar vein, Reinhart Koselleck, in his book Futures Past, identifies two metahistorical categories—horizon of expectation and space of experience. In expectation, he sees a “future made present” in the form of hopes, fears, and desires; in experience, he sees a “present past”—that is, a present, once recorded, as a past that incorporates remnants of others’ experiences. In this understanding, different stages of human history and all objects appearing in them bear the potential to be connected and generate meaningful conversations regardless of their direct contacts or causal relationships.
This notion of connected temporality also calls into question the teleological presentism prevalent in many fields, which only cares about parts of the past that were the seeds of progress in the present. In Korean studies, the lopsided abundance of scholarly works on modern and contemporary subjects inadvertently contributes to the “structural amnesia” about the more distant past in the intellectual genealogy of our field. The recent popularity of Korean popular culture and scholarly scrutiny of its diverse manifestations, moreover, foster and reinforce the field-specific presentism, which many media specialists decry beyond Korean studies. This anachronistic attitude hinders imaginative approaches to academic endeavors that take place in the present, utilizing the past and influencing our future. “Human flourishing,” in David Armitage’s definition, “is at once present-centered, future-oriented, and past-dependent.”
The proposal and the presentation should be in English. We encourage the submission of proposals for both individual papers and organized panels of three to four authors with papers in dialogue. We welcome proposals that grapple with any issues of time and temporalities, broadly defined. Some examples:
· Periodization: premodern/modern/postmodern
· Shifting temporality between the colonial and postcolonial
· Memoirs and autobiographies
· Alternate history
· Speculative fictions
· Newtro culture in media studies
· Docudramas
· Historians vs. novelists
· Protest temporalities/Protest aesthetics and transmemories
· Iterations of social movements through time and space (cultural practice, memorabilia, etc.)
· Racial, ethnic, and gender differences in the experience of time
· Religious temporalities
· Prosody/poetics/rhythm and time
· Post/Anti-Apocalypticism
Proposal word limit: 300 words maximum
Proposal deadline: April 5, 2025
Notification of acceptance: May 3, 2025
Proposal submission: korlitorg@gmail.com
Please direct any inquiries about the 2025 KLA Annual Conference to Hwisang Cho (hwisang.cho@emory.edu).