December 8-9, 2023 Symposium, UCLA
UCLA Luskin Conference Center
425 Westwood Plaza
Los Angeles CA, 90095
May 26th, 2023
Royce Hall 314 306
Symposium Information and Registration
Date: May 26th, 2023
Time: 9:30 AM–5:00 PM (Los Angeles Time)
Location: Royce Hall 306, UCLA
(Moved from Royce 314)
All sessions are hybrid. Please Register
See here for detailed symposium schedule
See here for morning roundtable session
See here for afternoon presenter bios and abstracts
The symposium will focus on Korea and Eurasia from the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries and highlight thematic approaches that resonate with other places and periods. The symposium features scholars interested in integrating early modern Korea into regional and global narratives. Their projects weave together Mongolian, Ming, Koryŏ, and Chosŏn histories or provide interdisciplinary perspectives on comparative issues related to statecraft, diplomacy, and culture.
The morning session is a roundtable featuring the authors of three new books Korea’s interactions with the Eurasian continent. The afternoon sessions feature presentations on current research by scholars based in the Los Angeles area.
This event is an effort to build a field and a community around histories of early modern Korea that are engaging and exciting to more than fellow specialists. It will be an opportunity to exchange ideas, explore new perspectives, and foster collaborative research efforts. We invite all interested scholars and researchers to participate in this event and contribute to the growth of the field of early modern Korean history.
Dr. Grace S. Fong
Professor, Department of East Asian Studies, McGill University
Friday, May 21st, 2021
2:00 PM-3:30 PM PST
Significant work by art historians of China have engaged with issues of gender and women, particularly the representation of women in the genres of “paintings of cultivated ladies” (仕女畫) and “paintings of beauties” (美人畫), from the Tang and Song to the Ming and Qing. Produced at court in early times, the intended audience was male, and the figures represented male conceptions of desired feminine subjectivities. During the Ming and Qing, these genres of painting circulated in a broader social context than in the Tang and Song. This paper explores changes to the production and reception of these painting genres in relation to the rise of women’s literary and artistic culture from the late Ming on. By drawing on the repertory of poetry written by women on viewing paintings and as inscriptions on paintings, I will explore questions about the new female audience and their responses to paintings of beauties and ladies. What were the contexts of viewing? How did women position themselves to the feminine subjectivities implied in paintings meant to appeal to male viewers? Were such paintings produced for a female audience? For women who painted, what visual self-representations did they create and how did they signify their gendered subjectivity?
About the Speaker
Grace Fong is Professor of Chinese Literature and Chair of the Department of East Asian Studies, McGill University. Author of Herself an Author: Gender, Agency, and Writing in Late Imperial China, she has published widely on classical Chinese poetry and poetics, autobiographical writing, and women writers of late imperial China.
Registration:
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A Book Talk with Laura Moretti
April 16, 11:00 AM (PST)
Hosted by the Yanai Initiative and the Asian Languages and Cultures Early Modern Asian Studies Speaker Series
Laura Moretti, author of Pleasure in Profit: Popular Prose in Seventeenth-Century Japan (2021). She is senior lecturer in premodern Japanese studies at the University of Cambridge and a fellow at Emmanuel College. She is also the author of Recasting the Past: An Early Modern “Tales of Ise” for Children (2016).
Virtual Book Launch with Dr. Laura Moretti,
Senior Lecturer in Pre-Modern Japanese Studies
University of Cambridge, Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies
Thursday, March 11, 2021 11:00 am-12:15 pm PST (7:00 pm GMT)
The Centre for Japanese Research (CJR) at the University of British Columbia presents a series of online book launches to celebrate recent publications about premodern Japan. For our March event, author Laura Moretti (University of Cambridge) will be discussing Pleasure in Profit: Popular Prose in Seventeenth-Century Japan in conversation with Joshua Mostow (University of British Columbia) and Satoko Shimazaki (University of California, Los Angeles).
Event website: https://cjr.iar.ubc.ca/pleasure-in-profit/
Zoom signup:
https://ubc.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_siGJF5nERui4QKTFv0XOrQ
About the speakers
Laura Moretti is senior lecturer in premodern Japanese studies at the University of Cambridge and a fellow at Emmanuel College. She is the author of Recasting the Past: An Early Modern “Tales of Ise” for Children (2016).
Joshua S. Mostow is a Professor in the Dept. of Asian Studies at UBC. His publications include Courtly Visions: The Ise Stories and the Politics of Cultural Appropriation (Brill, 2014), Pictures of the Heart: The Hyakunin Isshu in Word and Image (University of Hawai’i Press, 1996), and A Third Gender: Beautiful Youths in Japanese Edo-Period Prints and Paintings (1600-1868), with Asato Ikeda (Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum, 2016).
Satoko Shimazaki is an Associate Professor of Japanese literature and theater at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research focuses on early modern Japanese theater and popular literature; the modern history of kabuki; gender representation on the kabuki stage; and the interaction of performance, print, and text. She is the author of Edo Kabuki in Transition: From the Worlds of the Samurai to the Vengeful Female Ghost (Columbia University Press, 2016), which was awarded the John Whitney Hall Book Prize and honorable mention for the Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theater History. She also has a joint appointment as Associate Professor at Waseda University in Tokyo.
About the book
Pleasure in Profit: Popular Prose in Seventeenth-Century Japan
By Laura Moretti
Published by Columbia University Press
In the seventeenth century, Japanese popular prose flourished as waves of newly literate readers gained access to the printed word. Commercial publishers released vast numbers of titles in response to readers’ hunger for books that promised them potent knowledge. However, traditional literary histories of this period position the writings of Ihara Saikaku at center stage, largely neglecting the breadth of popular prose.
In the first comprehensive study of the birth of Japanese commercial publishing, Laura Moretti investigates the vibrant world of vernacular popular literature. She marshals new data on the magnitude of the seventeenth-century publishing business and highlights the diversity and porosity of its publishing genres. Moretti explores how booksellers sparked interest among readers across the spectrum of literacies and demonstrates how they tantalized consumers with vital ethical, religious, societal, and interpersonal knowledge. She recasts books as tools for knowledge making, arguing that popular prose engaged its audience cognitively as well as aesthetically and emotionally to satisfy a burgeoning curiosity about the world. Crucially, Moretti shows, readers experienced entertainment within the didactic, finding pleasure in the profit gained from acquiring knowledge by interacting with transformative literature. Drawing on a rich variety of archival materials to present a vivid portrait of seventeenth-century Japanese publishing, Pleasure in Profit also speaks to broader conversations about the category of the literary by offering a new view of popular prose that celebrates plurality.
Available for purchase from Columbia University Press: http://cup.columbia.edu/book/pleasure-in-profit/9780231197236.
Dr. Young Kyun Oh (Arizona State University)
Associate Professor of Chinese and Sino-Korean
Wednesday, October 28th, 2020
6:00 PM-7:30 PM
Please RSVP to receive Zoom links prior to event.
https://forms.gle/wGDNmARnuf8F4nrv5
Abstract
The art of reading literary Chinese in premodern Korea, especially in Chosŏn, placed an ample emphasis on vocalizing. Such a tradition left traces of orality in book spaces already in the tenth-century Koryŏ (918–1392), a practice that continued to evolve into paratextual glosses (collectively called kugyŏl or t’o) since then. Having to use literary Chinese as the de facto book language, whereas speaking in Korean, the premodern Korean literacy had to rely on this reading method at its core. Looking closely at the canonical book spaces of Chosŏn (1392–1910), particularly those of Confucian classics, we realize that the paratextual glosses gradually became a part of the text proper. The sound of reading—which is muted in modern silent reading practices—was everywhere in the book. We also learn that these glosses prescribed the reading practice with strict norms of pronunciation and syntactic parsing, in ways that would allow no more than one ‘correct’ reading. Yet, the resulting reading is clearly distant from vernacular Korean interpretation. This talk proposes that this voluminously vocal, meticulously programmed, and hardly translational reading practice is a product of the early modern Korea.
Bio
Young Kyun Oh is Associate Professor of Chinese and Sino-Korean at Arizona State University. He works on the cultural connection among East Asian societies, with particular foci on the language and the book, and has published on the linguistic histories and the culture of books of East Asia.
