Shuddering Century: Modernist Poetry in Colonial Korea and the Poetics of Belatedness

This presentation explored how a distinctive temporal consciousness - mainly a sense of belatedness, but of non-synchronousness or non-identity with the present regardless - characterizes Korean modernist poetry of the 1920s and ‘30s in such a way as to substantiate on the literary-cultural plane its latecomer advantage, what Leon Trotsky had called “the privilege of historical backwardness,” through the non-linear, non-sequential appearance of the various European avant-gardes “all at once, en masse,” as art historian Youngna Kim puts it. In his presentation, Dr. Smith suggested that the amalgamation of various forerunner movements constitutes the formal imprint of Korean modernist poetry’s belatedness, registered not merely as subjective feeling of falling behind among Korean poets such as O Chang-hwan, Kim Ki-rim, Yi Sang, and Im Hwa but as the literal coming after, in the wake of the European avant-garde’s heyday such that it became retroactively possible for the poem to magnetically attract and synthesize these cumulative exploits into a formal singularity otherwise unthinkable in Eurocentric literary-historical time.

The event has been organized by the Centre for the Study of Korea and co-sponsored by the Department of East Asian Studies and the Centre for Comparative Literature, University of Toronto.