Sponsors: The University of California Los Angeles Center for Korea Studies and Center for Southeast Asian Studies

Description:

During his lecture, Dr. King will make a preliminary and tentative attempt at comparing the ways in which vernacularized forms of Sinitic poetry (詩) were developed in Korea and Vietnam in the 17th-19th centuries. Taking his cue from Taylor (2008, 2020) and especially his consideration of “poems in demotic modes” and the quest for a “high-register vernacular voice,” Dr. King compares a range of hybridized and vernacularized forms of Sinitic poetry in Vietnam from the 16th and 17th centuries to analogous “irregular” or “anomalous” Sinitic poetry (soakpu小樂府,kwach’esi科體詩,pyŏnch’esi變體詩,p’agyŏksi破格詩,ŏnmun p’ungwŏl諺文風月,yuktam p’ungwŏl肉談風月, etc.) poems from late Chosŏn Korea and Korea’s Enlightenment Period (18th – early 20th centuries), as studied, for example, in Yi Kyuho (1986) and more recently in Pak Chongu (2009), Ku Sahoe (2015), and Sim Kyŏngho (2018). Questions addressed are the prosodic features of different types of vernacularized Sinitic poetry, the extent and varieties of vernacular accommodation, the extent to which the Korean examples sought to create a “vernacularized Sinitic voice,” and the fate of such poetry, both within contemporary generic hierarchies and in modern scholarship.   

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