Conference Abstracts

PANEL I:

THE BOOK AND DOMESTIC MATERIALITY

Vernacular Miscellany:
The Posthumous Biography of Madame Yun (Yun ssi haengjang)

Ksenia Chizhova

The undated and anonymous miscellany of the Kyujanggak Archive collection—The Posthumous Biography of Madame Yun (Yun ssi haengjang)—is provisionally titled after the first text it includes; otherwise, this is a fragmented, casual collection of different texts, copied by different hands, which apparently belonged to scribers of different calligraphic proficiency and age. In this volume, we see some pages copied in fluent cursive calligraphy, and others—in square wobbly letters, which perhaps suggests that this writing was done for brushwork practice. Alongside the biography that the famed Korean novelist, Kim Manjung (1637-1692) wrote for his mother, Madame Yun of Haep’yŏng, this hybrid volume includes excerpts of poetry and fictional prose, as well as practical advice for placenta burial and other matters. Conducting a close reading and material analysis of this collection I hope to illuminate the collective reading and copying practices of the collections’ scribers, and also sketch the boundaries of literary culture that this collection coalesces. Of special interest is the fact that this miscellany includes texts originally composed in literary Chinese, such as Kim Ch’unt’aek’s poem Seven songs of Mountain Lakes (Sanji ch’ilga 山池七歌), which are rendered in pure vernacular script. This, in turn, raises questions about the interaction between literary Chinese and vernacular Korean texts山池 and their audiences, which I will highlight.

Recipe Manuscripts as a Bodily Artifact

Suyoung Son

My paper focuses on the recipes of Lady Ch’oe of Haeju (1591–1660), the wife of a Confucian scholar Maeng Sehyŏng (1588–1646), to investigate the aspect of recipes as a bodily artifact. These relatively short recipes are transmitted as part of a family collection compiled by Maeng Chidae (1730–1793) titled Family Treasure (Chason Pochŏn), which collected thirty-four handwritings of women who were married into the Maeng clan of Sinchang for 270 years across seven generations. The women’s manuscript covers diverse genres, such as correspondences, miscellaneous records, posthumous accounts of conduct, translations of Chinese poetry and novels, and a list of the family-owned slaves, demonstrating that recipe writing was a part of the wider practice of household archiving that has long been assumed to exclude women. By closely examining the material shape of the collection, I will highlight the collection serves simultaneously as a precious material object, informational storage unit, and analog for a particular form of handiwork. The collection thus stresses the primacy of Confucian patriarchal impulse to shape women’s writing as legitimate patrimony yet is unable to ease the significance of the writing’s physicality—that is, women’s penmanship as an integral component of housework as character-building exercises, technologies of memory, and bodily properties.

Domesticity, Women, and Books in 19th to Early 20th-Century Korea

Ji-Eun Lee

Korea’s condensed modernization in the 20^th century touched every aspect of everyday life for Korean people, and the idea of family and home faced foundational challenges. Structural as well as physical changes were inevitable during the agrarian to industrial transition and rural to urban migrations for families and their homes. Existing scholarship on the changes in women’s place in domestic life during this time, however, focuses mainly on women’s agency and systemic gender inequality and less on physical circumstances and material components of domestic life. The bigger project to which this paper contributes aims to expand the focus to a broader concept of domesticity with questions such as what made home a home, and what was a woman’s expected role in making and maintaining that home on a day-to-day basis in late 19^th century Chosŏn and the earliest part of the 20^thcentury in Korea. Well-known earlier examples such as Naehun from the 15^th century, and Yŏsasŏ, “Puŭi” in Sasojŏl, and Konbŏm from the 18^th century as a backdrop, this research will focus on how “textbooks” written for women at the dawn of Korea’s modern era envisioned suitable knowledge for women. Format, materiality, and technology involved in producing such documents become a crucial element in this study on domesticity because these will help illuminate the value placed on issues of home, domestic life, and the importance of women’s involvement in domesticity. This paper examines three books that stand out for their emphasis on teaching hanja (Sinograph 漢字) to women, and discusses how their layout, organization, and choice of themes – materiality broadly defined – inform us about personal, familial, and social reasons behind the choice of material and script, intended audience, and circulation plans. By exploring formal aspects of these books, the paper investigates the changing concept of domesticity in an era of sea change. 

PANEL II:

READING, READABILITY, AND LITERACY AS SOCIAL PRACTICE

The Book as a Social Space:
Mediating the Written Word in Early Chosŏn Korea

Giovanni Volpe

The study of reading is generally framed around three main poles: the text, the book, and the reader. However, such a theoretical framework often tends to marginalize the broader social space in which the reading activity occurs. This social dimension appears particularly significant in premodern reading practices, which were generally much less confined to an individual and solitary type of reading than nowadays. This is indeed the case of early Chosŏn Korea, where reading often took the form of a “mediation” of the written text in various social domains and contexts. Analyzing the dynamics at play in such a variety of reading practices—how reader, text, and book not only interacted with each other but also with their intended listeners in a specific situation—allows us to understand the written culture of the time better.
The present paper investigates the reading practices of fifteenth-century Chosŏn Korea by combining a traditional bibliographical analysis of the primary sources with a theoretical framework that considers written texts as events situated in specific domains and situations. Such an analysis will center on vernacular texts such as early idu editions, the project of kugyŏl annotation of the Confucian classics, and texts compiled with the vernacular script during King Sejong’s reign. It will be argued that the social dimension of reading that characterized this period was a crucial factor in using vernacular reading and compositional methods, ultimately representing a driving force in creating a vernacular script. It will also point out how these social dynamics might call for a reassessment of the cultural impact that books could exert at all levels of society, superseding literacy levels and compensating for the absence of commercial printing.

Carving Readability:
The Mise-en-Page of Block-Printed Vernacular Novels as Interface

Si Nae Park

Block-printed vernacular novels form a repertoire of vernacular novels, or fictional narratives written entirely in the Korean script. Although the earliest records of them can be traced to the late eighteenth century, it was in the nineteenth century that block-printing of vernacular novels rose to ascendancy. Fifty-some titles were printed in Seoul, Chŏnju, and Ansŏng–a small fraction within the genre of vernacular novels as a whole that number in the several hundreds and that circulated widely through manuscript copies. Chosŏn elites dismissed block-printed novels as poorly-made book-like things containing incoherent writing, and sometimes identifying them with public reading to entertain the general populace. Rethinking previous research that has viewed commercial printers’ editorial interventions in terms of truncation for the sake of reducing production costs, I highlight that commercial printers were keen observers of reading habits as well as savvy media technicians who carefully calculated how best to maximize the readability of their commodities. I posit that undergirding the commercial printers’ design of the mise-en-page of their commodities was a twofold desire to co-opt the contemporary cultural practice of vocal reading (reading aloud, being read to, and subvocalizing) of vernacular novels, a practice that was accompanied by dramatized reading and extemporization, and to shape their products to compete against and symbiotically co-exist with the larger repertoire of vernacular novels that circulated in manuscript. This twofold concern influenced commercial printers’ editorial practices and their choice of the script styles, both cursive and regular, to be cut onto the woodblocks. This paper deepens our understanding of the ecology of commercial printing in early modern Korea by unraveling block-printed novels as an interface where multiple socio-cultural relations, such as manuscript vs. print, cursive vs. regular script styles, written-oral vs. aural dimensions of reading and readability, and book commerce and book aesthetics, intersected.

The Korean Book as a Vantage Point of Global Book History:
The Translations of Universal History of War and Their Reception

Jeonghun Choi

This paper examines the relationship among the Korean, Japanese and Euro-American books in the era of the Great Han Empire (1897-1910), when the drive of “Westernization” resulted in an entanglement of the Korean book with the global world of publication. Historians have labeled the books issued in this period as ones that advocated enlightenment and Westernization. Against the prevailing view that belittles it as a reproduction of the Japanese/Western book, I suggest the Korean book retains evidence of a peculiar media ecology that resists such a simplified interpretation. By spotlighting the Korean translations of Universal History of War (1894-1896), a Japanese publication series largely based on the translators’ compilation of Western bestsellers, this paper suggests the Korean book was a domesticating force of foreign book cultures. As the trajectories of the translators like Yu Kilchun (1856-1914) show, the changes that modern Korean book underwent were contingent on both the political history and the intervention of intellectual intermediaries. The translators’ choice of the mixed-script format without reading aids had a gatekeeping effect on their reception, which impeded forming such a broad readership enjoyed by their counterparts in Japan and the West. A record on a literatus’s recitation of History of American Independence (1899) suggests Koreans had an alternative way of accessing texts without directly perusing them. The Korean book also testifies to an indigenous interpretative framework that complicated Westernization. The paratextual evidence of History of the French Revolution (1900) reveals Chinese classics including Mencius and Book of Changes continued to provide the intellectual lens through which to recreate textual meanings. The process of readjusting book to the media ecology in Korea shows that the indigenous elements like the traditional culture of writing, the low level of literacy, and the pre-established canon resisted the universalizing force of the global book world.

PANEL III:

THE BOOK AS TECHNOLOGY AND INTERMEDIARY

Manuscript in an Era of Print, or Print in an Era of Manuscript:
The Example of Hong Manjong’s Tongguk yŏktae ch’ongmok

Graeme Reynolds

This paper investigates the movable type print and manuscript copies of Hong Manjong’s 洪萬宗 (1643–1725) Overview and Lessons of the Generations of the Eastern Country (Tongguk yŏktae ch’ongmok 東國歷代總目) to illuminate one avenue of the print-manuscript axis in the Chosŏn (1392–1910), where manuscript, movable type, and woodblock printing were all viable methods of producing the material text. Maintaining that the deployment of each medium was informed by the actors, economies, and genres of a given production, this paper analyses iterations of Hong’s history of the Korean peninsula, which covered antiquity through the seventeenth century, to argue that manuscript and print were symbiotic and mutually supporting during the Chosŏn dynasty. It further shows how the frozen fluidity of manuscript and shifting fixity of movable type print varied according to the adoption or abandonment of disciplinary practices during production. Extant copies of the typographic edition of Hong’s work, covertly printed in 1705 using the Chosŏn court’s movable type, evince a divergent number of corrections made during production. The circulation of differently corrected versions of the Overview and Lessons inspired numerous manuscript reproductions, demonstrating the role printed texts played in the flourishing of manuscript culture. The manuscript reproductions display a strict but limited fidelity to their models, duplicating the textual errors or corrections while boasting new page layouts, abridgements of the text, and selective additions of historical information. In foregrounding the characteristics of movable type print and manuscript production and emphasizing generic and mise-en-page features, this paper contextualizes Hong’s work within a larger tradition of historiography, and enriches our understanding of practices of movable type correction in unofficial publications, the utilization of manuscript reproduction to (re-)make the book, and the codependence of Chosŏn’s typographic and chirographic cultures within its non-commercial media ecology.

Messy Writings: Unraveling Korean Manuscript Books

Hwisang Cho

The historiography of premodern Korean books is mostly characterized by a series of technological breakthroughs in printing technology. The discovery of the world’s oldest extant xylographic imprint produced in the early eighth century, the Dharani of the Pure Immaculate Light, in 1966 places Korea as the outlier in global print culture. More than 80,000 woodblocks of the Tripitaka carved twice on the state’s initiative firstly during the Khitan invasion at the turn of the eleventh century and later during the Mongol invasion in the thirteenth century, in expectation of invoking Buddha’s power to repel foreign invaders, confirms how advanced the woodblock printing technology was. The Jikji (Anthology of Great Buddhist Priests’ Zen Teachings), published in 1377, is the world’s oldest existing book printed with metal moveable type, earlier than Gutenberg by several decades. A spate of improvements in metal moveable type filled the fifteenth century, which coincided with the invention of the Korean alphabet. Despite all these magnificent feats by religious and state authorities, the shelves of educated elites were mostly filled with hand-copied manuscript books until the turn of the twentieth century. This presentation attempts to explicate this gap between the innovations in printing technology and the actual book culture. In particular, it will delve into some manuscript books that I stumbled upon in Dongsan Library of Keimyung University (通文疏抄 and 李浣亭追享通文 in particular), whose messy pages made reading texts extremely strenuous, if not impossible. Drawing upon works of abstract calligraphy in contemporary art and their historical connection to the cultures of Confucian scholarship and Buddhist devotion in premodern East Asia, I will demonstrate how the emphasis on the embodiment of knowledge transmuted books into objects not simply for reading but also as intermediaries between knowledge and the scholars’ bodies.

Binding for Prestige:
The Booklization of Genealogies in Korea, 1500-1800

Xin Yu

Genealogies had existed in Korea before the fifteenth century, but they increasingly took the form of the book in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Genealogies gradually changed from hanging scrolls or single-sheet diagrams to paginated manuscripts or printed books that included editorial principles, tables of contents, prefaces, and postfaces. Also, under the influence of Chinese genealogies, patrilineal genealogies replaced bi-lineal ones as the new norm. This process of “booklization” in which genealogies became books is the theme of my article. In this article, I analyze genealogical materials—which have been extensively mined by social and political historians—with two new methods. First, I use digital methods (mainly corpus analysis and topic modeling) to analyze a dataset of 400 genealogy prefaces mostly gleaned from Hanʾguk chokpo kubo sŏjip 韓國族譜舊譜序集, identifying how genealogy editors justified their production of genealogy books; second, I conduct visual and material analysis of a selected sample of genealogies now held at the Harvard-Yenching Library and on the FamilySearch website (such as Andong Kwŏn-ssi segye 安東權氏世系 and Munhwa Yu-ssi sebo 文化柳氏世譜). Combining the distant reading of genealogical discourses and the close visual and material analysis of genealogy books, this article will shed light on the mechanism of book production in pre-modern Korea and, more broadly, by comparing Korean genealogies with Chinese ones, shed light on non-commercial publishing in pre-modern East Asia in general.

Opportunities for Deep Learning: Early-to-Mid Twentieth-Century Korean Periodicals

Wayne de Fremery

Our understanding of early twentieth-century Korean books and periodicals is hampered by a lack of knowledge about the people and organizations that printed them. Similarly, we lack an understanding of the typography that formulated them as printed books and periodicals. Comprehensive lists of the era’s printers (inswaeso), for example, have never been compiled. Rudimentary descriptive catalogs of early twentieth-century Korean typography do not exist. In short, we lack basic information about the “material habitat of written words in Korea.” Based on research conducted at the National Library of Korea in 2021, this paper describes the use of deep learning technologies to automate the identification and transcription of colophons found in printed materials produced on the Korean peninsula in the early twentieth century. Deep learning models were built to be able to successfully identify 932 colophons in a collection of 89,981 images associated with 1,009 rare (kwijungbon) periodical issues printed between 1910 and 1960. Deep learning models were also built to transcribe the colophons into digital text with roughly 95% accuracy, which made it possible to identify 102 organizations (primarily printing companies, inswaeso) directly responsible for producing the 932 periodical issues. On its own, this finding fills in a gap in our understanding of Korean periodicals by identifying many of the organizations that printed them. It also presents the opportunity to systematically collect typographical samples from each printing organization to better describe and catalog how the Korean language was represented in the early twentieth century. As the paper describes in its conclusion, more comprehensive descriptions of early twentieth century Korean typography will enable deep learning technologies to transcribe early twentieth-century Korean books and periodicals into digital forms more quickly and accurately, in turn enabling new ways to know and read them.