Impossible Speech: The Politics of Representation in Contemporary Korean Literature and Film Available to Purchase

In Impossible Speech, Christopher P. Hanscom delves into a question that, to my mind, has been the most critically dealt with in the history of modern Korean literature—namely, What is the relationship between art and politics? In modern Korea, the imperative of literary practice as an emancipatory force became especially relevant in times of sustained resistance against hegemonic forces. The task of exposing social reality and giving voice to those oppressed by the structures of colonial domination and, subsequently, of totalitarian governmentality spawned major terms of debate among writers and critics throughout the twentieth century, including the question of which literary aesthetic can best address the anticolonial and antiauthoritarian imperatives. But what happens when the politics of resistance in the past come to bear on how we understand the present? What does it mean for a work of art—be it textual or visual—to expose social reality and represent a...