A House Divided: The Rise of Pluricentric Korean in the post-liberation Era

The geopolitical division of the Korean Peninsula in 1945 also resulted in the rupture of many colonial-era (1910-1945) cultural movements, among them the Korean language reform movement headed by the Han’gŭl Society (Han’gŭl hakhoe). Many of the members of this influential society “went North” after 1945, contributing to an emergent North Korean language policy and planning regime that increasingly diverged from its South Korean counterpart. In this talk, I will demonstrate how this bifurcation eventually became established in not only language and literature, but also the interpretation of pre-modern Korean history and its relationship to national legitimacy. As a case study to demonstrate this divergence in the realm of literature, I examine two translations of The Tale of Unyŏng (early seventeenth century) into vernacular Korean in South Korea (1960) and North Korea (1966).

Daniel Pieper is the Korea Foundation Lecturer in Korean Studies and the Director of Korean Studies in the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University. He specializes in modern Korean language and literary history. His current research focuses on the emergence of vernacular Korean as a discrete subject in the modern school, the textual differentiation process of cosmopolitan Hanmun and vernacular Korean, and the role of language ideology in directing language standardization in late-nineteenth and twentieth-century Korea. His forthcoming book (University of Toronto Press) is titled Cosmopolitan Memories, Vernacular Visions: The Roots of Modern Korea.