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Please join the GW Institute for Korean Studies for our FINAL Premodern Korea Lecture Series
About the Event
Against the backdrop of different texts from the collected writings of Sǒljam Kim Sisǔp, in this talk, Professor Wuerthner will offer an against-the-grain reading of Kim’s famous collection of strange tales Kǔmo sinhwa (New Tales of the Golden Turtle). He argues that Kim’s life as well as his fictional and non-fictional literature should be viewed in the tradition of earlier Chinese and Korean anti-Buddhist Neo-Confucian thinkers. By discussing such issues as funerary rites, “unhappy” Confucians, or the persuasive power of storytelling, Professor Wuerthner hypothesizes that Kǔmo sinhwa may be read as a piece of narrative anti-religious propaganda-fiction designed to thwart a revival of Buddhism on the state level in the 1460s.
About the Speaker
Dennis Wuerthner is serving as Assistant Professor of East Asian Literatures at the Department of World Languages & Literatures of Boston University. His main field of research is Korean literature, history and culture in a broader East Asian context.
