TY - JOUR
T1 - Vernacular itineraries
T2 - Korean letters from family to national archive
AU - Chizhova, Ksenia
N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2019 by the Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York.
PY - 2019
Y1 - 2019
N2 - Vernacular Korean letters were exchanged routinely in the royal and elite families of Chosǒn Korea (1392-1910), and women were at least on one side of a letter's itinerary. While male-centered literary Chinese learning held highest prestige, the patriarchal families of the time cherished their private archives, in which vernacular letters were sentimental mementos, testaments of women's learning, and status symbols. This familial epistolary archive received varying elaborations as it transitioned into museums and departments of national literature in South Korea. While elite vernacular epistolary style (naeganch'e) embodies the core of tradition and national literature for such colonial-era intellectuals as Yi Pyǒnggi (1891-1968) and Yi T'aejun (1904.?), the anticolonial and antifeudal current of the post-1945 South Korean scholarship overlooks the elite tradition. This explains the persistent invisibility of women-centered elite vernacular culture in the contemporary scholarship of Chosǒn Korea. Developing the notion of itinerary-the transition, appropriation, and recoding of elite vernacular letters.this article ponders the implication of archival practices upon the study of the past, and highlights the knowledge systems that determined the visibility and meaning of elite vernacular culture in Korea's modern era.
AB - Vernacular Korean letters were exchanged routinely in the royal and elite families of Chosǒn Korea (1392-1910), and women were at least on one side of a letter's itinerary. While male-centered literary Chinese learning held highest prestige, the patriarchal families of the time cherished their private archives, in which vernacular letters were sentimental mementos, testaments of women's learning, and status symbols. This familial epistolary archive received varying elaborations as it transitioned into museums and departments of national literature in South Korea. While elite vernacular epistolary style (naeganch'e) embodies the core of tradition and national literature for such colonial-era intellectuals as Yi Pyǒnggi (1891-1968) and Yi T'aejun (1904.?), the anticolonial and antifeudal current of the post-1945 South Korean scholarship overlooks the elite tradition. This explains the persistent invisibility of women-centered elite vernacular culture in the contemporary scholarship of Chosǒn Korea. Developing the notion of itinerary-the transition, appropriation, and recoding of elite vernacular letters.this article ponders the implication of archival practices upon the study of the past, and highlights the knowledge systems that determined the visibility and meaning of elite vernacular culture in Korea's modern era.
KW - Archives and memory
KW - Chosǒn Korea
KW - Elite vernacular Korean culture
KW - Nationalization of tradition
KW - Vernacular Korean epistolary anthologies
KW - Women's culture
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U2 - https://doi.org/10.1215/07311613-7686614
DO - https://doi.org/10.1215/07311613-7686614
M3 - Article
SN - 0731-1613
VL - 24
SP - 345
EP - 371
JO - Journal of Korean Studies
JF - Journal of Korean Studies
IS - 2
ER -