Dr. Young Kyun Oh (Arizona State University)
Associate Professor of Chinese and Sino-Korean
Wednesday, October 28th, 2020
6:00 PM-7:30 PM
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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.
