"The Age of Doubt: Pak Kyŏngni and the Female Writer in Twentieth-Century Korea"

Best known for Land, a historical novel cycle in twenty-one volumes that took twenty-five years to complete, Pak Kyŏngni is modern Korea's greatest female writer, her stature matched perhaps only by Pak Wan-sŏ. Through the eyes of women whose lives became the most vulnerable to the catastrophes of Korea's twentieth century, Pak Kyŏngni's works bear witness to that history's sharpest contradictions.

In this session, we will closely read together "The Age of Doubt" (1957), one of Pak's earlier short stories, as a point of entry for understanding Pak's literature as a pursuit of "dignified life" in conditions that only permit mere survival. We will then chart the evolution of this pursuit in her longer works across the century and ask why Pak Kyŏngni matters for female writers in Korea today.  

Lecturer

Prof. Dr. Ryu Youngju (Associate Professor at the University of Michigan, United States)

Prof. Dr. Ryu Youngju is Associate Professor of Korean Literature and Director of the Nam Center for Korean Studies at the University of Michigan. She received her BA in English from Harvard University and her PhD in Korean Literature from University of California-Los Angeles. She is the author of Writers of the Winter Republic: Literature and Resistance in Park Chung Hee's Korea, the winner of 2018 Association for Asian Studies James Palais Book Prize, and the editor of Cultures of Yusin: South Korea in the 1970s. She edits two book series on Korea: Perspectives on Contemporary Korea and Three||Eight: Korean Literatures in Northeast Asia, both published by the University of Michigan Press.