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CANCELLED: “Amplifying Voices: Auditory Texts in Colonial Korea, 1910-1945”

Friday, December 4, 2020 at 12:00pm

Virtual Event

"Amplifying Voices: Auditory Texts in Colonial Korea (1910-45)" attends to the junction between sound and literature in focusing on works written for radio broadcast from the Japanese Colonial Period. Yadam is a compound word consisting of Chinese characters “unofficial” and “talk” which can be translated into English as “anecdotes,” “miscellany” or even “historical romance.” Although yadam as an oral and written literary genre has longer origins and history that goes back to the Chosŏn dynasty (1392-1905), what interests me in this study is its remanifestation through new media, such as newspapers, magazines, and radio broadcasting, in the early twentieth century. I will demonstrate the relationship between yadam as a traditional literary narrative that has oral origins and its remediazation through the advent of the microphone and radio which ironically facilitated oral storytelling contests making Korean language and tradition more audible therefore often serving a kind of learning purpose for the Korean listeners, who at this time were Japanese colonial subjects living under Japanese language soundscape.

Jina Kim, East Asian Languages and Literatures, University of Oregon