In this book talk, Dafna Zur tells the story of the emergence and development of writing for children in modern Korea. Starting in the 1920s, a narrator-adult voice began to speak directly to a child-reader. This child audience was perceived as unique because of a new concept: the child-heart, the perception that the child’s body and mind were transparent and knowable, and that they rested on the threshold of culture. This privileged location enabled writers and illustrators, educators and psychologists, intellectual elite and laypersons to envision the child as a powerful antidote to the present and as an uplifting metaphor of colonial Korea’s future.
Reading children’s periodicals against the political, educational, and psychological discourses of their time, Dafna Zur argues that the figure of the child was particularly favorable to the project of modernity and nation-building, as well as to the colonial and postcolonial projects of socialization and nationalization. Zur’s analysis reveals the complex ways in which the figure of the child became a driving force of nostalgia that stood in for future aspirations for the individual, family, class, and nation.
Dafna Zur is Assistant Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Stanford, where she teaches courses on Korean literature, cinema, and popular culture. She has published articles on North Korean science fiction, the Korean War in North and South Korean children’s literature, childhood in cinema, and Korean popular culture. Her fiction translations have been published in wordwithoutborders.org, The Columbia Anthology of Modern Korean Short Stories, and the Asia Literary Review.
This EAC event is co-sponsored by the Graduate Center for Literary Research, the Department of History, the Reinventing Japan Research Focus Group, and the Department of East Asian Languages & Cultural Studies.
