Changing Woman and the Collective Voice in Navajo and Korean Literature: Oral Tradition and the Poetry of Luci Tapahonso and Kim Hyesun
By Ivanna Sang Een Yi
This talk compares the use of the collective voice by leading Diné/Navajo and Korean poets Luci Tapahonso and Kim Hyesun. Countering a narrative of the diminishment of oral traditions, the talk foregrounds the significance and flourishing of the oral tradition in (post)colonial contexts.
About the speaker: Ivanna Sang Een Yi is a scholar of Korean literature, culture, and performance. Her research focuses on the performative dimensions of living oral traditions as they interact with written literature and the environment from the late Chosŏn period to the present. Her current book project, Continuing Orality and the Environment in Korean Literature, examines the flourishing of Korean oral traditions such as p'ansori (epic dramatic storytelling) and sijo (lyric poetry) through transformative encounters with writing, the environment, and recording technology. The monograph engages Indigenous perspectives and theories from the Americas to illuminate ways in which land has been treated as a sentient interlocutor rather than a commodity by Korean singers and writers both before and after the rise of global capitalism. She is also working on a second monograph project which examines the representation of nonhuman animals and interspecies relationships in modern and contemporary Korean literature. Before coming to Cornell, she was a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder and a Korea Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at Washington University in St. Louis.
Friday, October 30th, 2020 from 12:00- 1:00pm