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A Study of Hypertexts of «Kuunmong» 九雲夢, Focusing on «Kuullu» 九雲樓 / «Kuun’gi» 九雲記

Nine Clouds in Motion

by Dennis Wuerthner (Author)
©2017 Thesis 280 Pages
Series: Research on Korea, Volume 8

Summary

This case study deals with late Chosŏn dynasty works of narrative fiction modelled after Kuunmong (A Dream of Nine Clouds) by Kim Manjung (1637–1692). The focus lies on a novel extant in two manuscripts: Sinjŭng Kuullu (Revised augmented edition of the Nine Cloud Tower) and Sinjŭng chaeja Kuun’gi (Revised augmented caizi edition of the Story of Nine Clouds), short Kuullu/Kuun’gi. While this study specifically discusses late premodern hypertexts of Kuunmong, it is also concerned with a set of broader questions regarding the diffusion, circulation, reception, and creative transformation of literary products of different languages on the eve of modernity in Sino-centric East Asia.

Table Of Contents

  • Cover
  • Title
  • Copyright
  • About the author
  • About the book
  • This eBook can be cited
  • Contents
  • Notes on Transliterations, Names, and Translations
  • Acknowledgements
  • 1. Introduction
  • 1.1 On the rise and transformation of Kuunmong
  • 1.2 Concepts and objectives
  • 2. Kuunmong and its hypertexts in late Chosŏn dynasty Korea
  • 2.1 Late Chosŏn dynasty re-invented hypertexts of Kuunmong
  • 2.2 Ongnumong, Chang Kukchin chŏn and Chŏkkang ch’ilsŏn
  • 2.3 Oksŏnmong
  • 2.3.1 When Hŏ Kŏt’ong fell asleep in Blue Crane Grotto – The frame-narrative of Oksŏnmong
  • 2.3.2 Amorous adventures amid fleeting dreams
  • 2.3.3 The weariness of human pursuit
  • 2.4 Re-invented hypertexts of Kuunmong
  • 3. The “mosaic-hypertext” Kuullu/Kuun’gi
  • 3.1 Sinjŭng chaeja Kuun’gi ~ Sinjŭng Kuun’gi ~ Kuun’gi: A manuscript-in-progress
  • 3.2 Premodern references to Jiuyunlou, Kuullu and Kuun’gi
  • 3.3 A brief overview of research
  • 3.4 The discovery of Kuullu
  • 3.5 Dream, Tower, Record – some thoughts on the titles of the different works
  • 4. Hypotexts of Kuullu/Kuun’gi and the issue of readership awareness
  • 4.1 Some remarks on the circulation and reception of vernacular fiction in late Chosŏn dynasty Korea
  • 4.2 History and fiction in Kuullu/Kuun’gi
  • 4.3 Textual borrowings in Kuullu/Kuun’gi
  • 4.3.1 Textual borrowings from Hongloumeng
  • 4.3.2 Textual borrowings from Shuihu zhuan
  • 4.3.3 Textual borrowings from Nüxian waishi, Jinghua yuan and other secondary hypotexts
  • 4.3.4 Textual borrowings in the poetry featured in Kuullu/Kuun’gi
  • 4.3.5 Textual borrowings from works of caizi jiaren
  • 4.4 Hypotexts of Kuullu/Kuun’gi – closing remarks
  • 5. Implications of dialogues with literary predecessors
  • 5.1 Kuullu/Kuun’gi as “criticism in action”
  • 5.2 Secondary hypotexts in Kuullu/Kuun’gi suggesting possible hypotexts of Kuunmong
  • 5.3 General conventions of Chinese vernacular fiction in Kuullu/Kuun’gi
  • 5.3.1 On the heightened degree of narrative intensity in Kuullu/Kuun’gi
  • 5.4 Transformations in Kuullu/Kuun’gi in the light of generic conventions
  • 5.4.1 The miraculous births of heroines and heroes
  • 5.4.2 Instructions by sages and the presentation of military manuals
  • 5.4.3 Magical warfare and the incorporation of evil Daoists
  • 5.5 Tea and antagonists – Features of popular genre of Chinese fiction in Kuullu/Kuun’gi
  • 5.5.1 Encyclopedic entries on the art of making tea
  • 5.5.2 Antagonists in Kuullu/Kuun’gi
  • 5.5.2.1 Loose ends: the literati of Luoyang
  • 5.5.2.2 Zhang, the antagonist(s)
  • 5.6 Literary predecessors and the “so what”
  • 6. Markets, mosaics, and Nine Clouds in motion
  • 7. References
  • 7.1 Primary Sources
  • 7.2 Secondary Sources
  • Series Index

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Notes on Transliterations, Names, and Translations

McCune-Reischauer Romanization is used for transliterating Korean as well as Literary Chinese (hanmun 漢文) used in Korean sources. When citing secondary sources, however, I follow the romanizations used by the original writers. For Chinese, I have used Pinyin.

Korean, Chinese, and Japanese names are written in the order of surname followed by given name.

When sources are translated into English, the texts in the original language appear in the respective footnotes. All the translations of Literary Chinese, vernacular Korean (ŏnmun 諺文), and contemporary Korean (han’gugŏ 한국어) are my own, unless noted otherwise. In translated passages, comments and additions are indicated by square brackets. ← 9 | 10 →

← 10 | 11 →

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to many people who taught and helped me over the years. I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Marion Eggert. Without her tremendous guidance and support, the present study would never have been possible. I also wish to thank Jörg Plassen. I was incredibly fortunate to have had two such extraordinary teachers. I would like to offer my special thanks to Rüdiger Breuer for his assistance in the supervision of this study. Moreover, I would like to express my appreciation to my seniors at Ruhr-University Bochum: Myoungin Yu, Thorsten Traulsen, Andreas Müller-Lee, Dorothea Hoppmann, and Hanju Yang. Thank you to Felix Siegmund, Barbara Wall, Florian Pölking, Gwendolin Kleine Stegemann, Gunhild Stierand-Kim and Jürgen Mühl, who offered encouragement and valuable critiques during our colloquia. I am particularly thankful for the assistance and material provided by Yang Sŭngmin. Also, the help offered by Vladimir Glomb was greatly appreciated. I am immensely grateful for the financial support by the Academy of Korean Studies. I would also like to thank Elsa Küppers and Robert Duncan McColl for their help on the manuscript. And I wish to thank my wife, Jiwon, and our kids Joan and Lian for everything, especially for their incredible patience. Finally, I would like to deeply thank my parents and sisters for all they have done for me.

Illustration contained in: Gale, The Cloud Dream of the Nine, 296.

img1 ← 11 | 12 →

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1.   Introduction

Kuunmong 九雲夢 (A Dream of Nine Clouds or The Cloud Dream of the Nine),1 which is today considered the first full-fledged Korean novel, was written in 1687/1688 by Kim Manjung 金萬重 (1637–1692, pen name Sŏp’o 西浦),2 a prominent scholar officials of seventeenth century Chosŏn dynasty Korea (1392–1897).3 Belonging to the genre of dream-journey fiction,4 Kuunmong is structurally divided into a frame-narrative showing a “reality”, and a core-narrative depicting a “dream”: the initial part of the frame-narrative relates the story of the Buddhist monk Sŏngjin’s 性眞 fall from grace due to his liaison with eight Daoist fairies and his subsequent banishment from a heavenly Buddhist realm into earthly life; the core dream-narrative narrates the story of Sŏngjin’s human reincarnation Yang Soyu 楊少游 and his quest to assemble eight women around him in accordance with the rites and eventually lead a life of civil and military glory and success; while the closing part of the frame-narrative shows Sŏngjin being woken from his dream by his Master Yukkwan (Yukkwan taesa 六觀大師), and realizing the vacuity of human pursuit. Today the novel is considered an unsurpassed masterpiece of Korean literature, and studies on various aspects of Kuunmong are legion, both in Korea and the West.

Kuunmong was immensely popular in mid to late nineteenth century Chosŏn Korea. This can be seen, for example, in an entry in Oju yŏnmun changjŏn san’go 五洲衍文長箋散稿 (Scattered Manuscripts of Glosses and Comments of Oju, 1837) by Yi Kyugyŏng 李圭景 (1788–1856), who wrote: “What is popular among the small lanes and alleyways [of the capital] is only Kuunmong.”5 Moreover, Kuunmong was frequently discussed by some of the leading intellectual figures of early twentieth century Korea. For instance, in an article on Kuunmong, colonial ← 13 | 14 → modernity’s intellectual giant Ch’oe Namsŏn 崔南善 (1890–1957; pen name Yuktang 六堂) touched on an important facet, stating: “Be that as it may, Kuunmong, as the greatest masterpiece of our national literature, especially of our history of narrative fiction, brought forth a large variety of different kinds of novels in its wake”.6 Almost casually, Ch’oe Namsŏn here mentions a significant fact, namely that Kuunmong served as the literary foundation for quite a number of works of narrative fiction during late premodern times. Thus, Kuunmong is of importance within the realm of a consideration of intertextuality and parodic writing in late Chosŏn dynasty Korea.

The study at hand deals with late premodern works of narrative fiction based on and modelled after Kuunmong. It is essentially a case study, in which a comparative approach is used to offer a detailed discussion of certain novels, some of which have thus far drawn little attention from scholars of Korean Studies in both Korea and the West. In this framework, the focus is laid on a novel extant in two manuscripts: Sinjŭng Kuullu 新增九雲樓 (Revised augmented edition of the Nine Cloud Tower, or Newly supplemented edition of the Nine Cloud Tower; Chinese: Xinzeng Jiuyunlou) and Sinjŭng chaeja Kuun’gi 新增才子九雲記 (Revised augmented caizi edition of the Story of Nine Clouds, or Newly supplemented genius edition of the Story of Nine Clouds; Chinese: Xinzeng caizi Jiuyunji), short Kuullu/Kuun’gi.7 While this study on intertextuality in late premodern Korean literature predominantly discusses the modes of and possible motivations for transformations and reconfigurations in the realm of a very specific group of texts, it is inevitably also concerned with a set of broader questions regarding the diffusion, circulation, reception, and creative transformation of literary products of different languages during the late Chosŏn dynasty, the relationship between the literatures of China and Korea, and the conceptions of self, other or the union of both on the eve of modernity in Sino-centric East Asia. ← 14 | 15 →

1.1   On the rise and transformation of Kuunmong

Today Kuunmong (from here on abbreviated KUM), which is extant in both premodern Literary Chinese (hanmun in Korean or wenyan in Chinese, the lingua franca in premodern East Asia) and vernacular Korean (han’gŭl) editions, is widely regarded as an unsurpassed monument of Korean literature. Over the course of the twentieth century, it was established as the epitome of Chosŏn narrative fiction, the “exemplary work of classical Korean fiction”,8 and in contemporary South Korea, scholars of literature have praised it enthusiastically.9 In North Korean literary studies, too, KUM is held in high esteem, for instance as a ← 15 | 16 → novel genuinely rooted in Korean folklore,10 as well as a work of literary historical value11 which is acknowledged to have had an influence on the development of Korean narrative literature12.13

Nevertheless, as was shown comprehensively in the thesis Kuunmong und die koreanische Literaturwissenschaft: Wissenschaftsgeschichte als Provokation (Kuunmong and Korean literary Studies: a History of Scholarship as Provocation), in which the author Myoungin Yu examines the rise of Kim Manjung’s novel in the framework of the establishment of a national tradition of Korean literature, KUM, a tale heavily influenced by Chinese literature and thought, which is set in an idealized Tang dynasty China (618–907), was not always regarded as such a representative masterpiece in Korea.14 In fact, even as late as the mid-1930s, ← 16 | 17 → prominent intellectuals and scholars of literature noted that KUM was a very well-known, yet not outstanding piece of premodern fiction. For instance, in a 1936 article entitled “Kojŏn munhak-ŭi kamsang-gwa yŏn’gu – Kuunmong-ŭi kach’i” 古典文學의 鑑賞과 硏究, 九雲夢의 價値 (An Appreciation and Study of premodern Literature – the Value of Kuunmong)15 Yang Kŏnsik 梁建植 (1889–1939), one of the leading experts and translators of Chinese literature of the colonial era,16 who apparently came in touch with Kim Manjung’s novel sometime in the 1890s, wrote:

Kuunmong is a masterpiece. You can see this from the fact that the names of the leading characters Sŏngjin and the eight fairies have been known to both young and old for a long time. [Kuunmong] has made a very strong impression on the people of Korea, both as a novel as well as a play.17 When I first obtained it in my youth, I read it for several days without end, just as if I was addicted to it. […] However, back then I did not yet know the ways of the world, and when I look at it now, it is no more but [the work of] a writer playing around with brush and ink, nothing but a leisurely written chuanqi [Korean: chŏn’gi 傳奇, “transmission of the strange”], a piece of literature from a time long gone. […] We cannot put it on our desks as an exquisite work of literature.18

As mentioned by Yang Kŏnsik, KUM had circulated widely in Korea during the late Chosŏn dynasty, especially in the wake of the rise of commercial woodblock-printing during the nineteenth century, and sources suggest that it had a broad ← 17 | 18 → and diversified readership.19 Yet despite its general popularity, the novel was most likely not considered a piece of high art in late premodern Korea. At the beginning of the modern age, KUM appears to have been viewed as a premodern romance which, in terms of literary historical significance, did not considerably surpass such works as Ch’unhyang chŏn 春香傳 (Biography of Ch’unhyang), Hong Kildong chŏn 洪吉童傳 (Biography of Hong Kildong), or Sa-ssi namjŏnggi 謝氏南征記 (Records of Lady Sa’s Journey to the South)20.21 Moreover, alongside such works as Samguk sagi 三國史記 (History of the Three Kingdoms, thirteenth century) by Iryŏn 一然 (1206–1289), Yŏrha ilgi 熱河日記 (The Jehol Diary, 1780) by ← 18 | 19 → Pak Chiwŏn 朴趾源 (1737–1805) or Tongin sihwa 東人詩話 (On Korean [Easterners’] Poetry, 1474) by Sŏ Kŏjŏng 徐居正 (1420–1488), KUM belonged to a set of premodern works printed with modern typeset in the early years of Japanese rule in Korea (1905–1945). During this time, several organizations published and circulated old Korean books in new formats: the Chōsen Kosho Kankōkai朝鮮古書刊行會 (Society for the Publication of old Korean Books, 1908–1916), which was under the patronage of the Japanese authorities; the publishing company Chōsen kenkyūkai 朝鮮硏究會, which was founded in Keijō (Seoul) in 1908 by Hosoi Hajime 細井肇 (1886–1934) and published Japanese translations of Korean works; and the Chosŏn kwangmunhoe (Society for Promoting Korean Culture, 1910–1918), which was founded by a number of towering figures of Korean enlightenment such as Pak Ŭnsik 朴殷植 (1859–1925) or Ch’oe Namsŏn, and which actively collected, collated and published works of premodern Korean history, philosophy and literature in cheap modern print editions.22 Although KUM was one of the books printed extensively as woodblock-print editions (Korean: panggakpon 坊刻本) during the late nineteenth century, it appears to have become even more easily available and widely known thanks to modern typeset editions designed for mass consumption brought out by these organizations,23 and sources suggest that even in rural areas the story of KUM belonged to a realm of common knowledge among (most likely illiterate) farmers, who might ← 19 | 20 → have heard it from storytellers.24 Furthermore, other sources seem to imply that it was predominantly the novel’s (most superficial) slightly salacious storyline of a man’s relationship with eight women that was readily recognized by average readers of novels up until the mid-1920s.25 In the first historiography of Korean literature Chosŏn munhaksa 朝鮮文學史 (A History of Korean Literature, 1922), the author An Hwak 安廓 (1886–1946) mentions KUM merely en passant,26 and in a later article entitled Yijo sidae-ŭi munhak 李朝時代의 文學 (Literature during the Yi dynasty, 1933) An Hwak even argued that

[…] if one looks at Pukhŏn chapsŏl by Kim Ch’unt’aek, it says that Kim Manjung, a man who lived during the time of King Sukchong’s reign, brought forth a number of novels, but today only Kuunmong has been transmitted. As it [Kuunmong] is just an imitation of Chinese novels, there is nothing remarkable about it.27

Hence, during the early phase of colonial modernity, even renowned scholars of literature apparently viewed KUM primarily as a piece of premodern trivial literature, which could not rival works by highly regarded Western writers.28

However, during the latter half of Japanese colonial rule, the perception of KUM by certain scholars of literature changed. In the wake of the developing nationalist movement of self-strengthening that stressed the uniqueness and high standards of Korean culture and in the course of which Korean intellectuals reevaluated the Chosŏn dynasty with regards to its decidedly Korean cultural ← 20 | 21 → achievements in the face of looming cultural extinction,29 KUM was progressively valued by nationalist scholars of literature, and was eventually placed at the center of the continuously developing concept of a national literature (kungmunhak). From the early 1930s on, KUM came to gain a standing as the classic masterpiece of Korean literature, and gradually came to be viewed as the only work of Chosŏn fiction which was truly of comparable stature to Chinese and Western masterworks.30 The full-fledged novel KUM,31 extant in various han’gŭl editions and written more than half a century before the Chinese masterwork Hongloumeng by no other than Kim Manjung, whom the influential scholar of literature Kim T’aejun 金台俊 (1905-ca. 1950) called the “sole writer of national literature in premodern Korea”,32 seemed fit to serve as a prime example for a new, nationalistically charged view of an indigenous, high-class tradition of narrative fiction. In Chosŏn sosŏlsa 朝鮮小說史 (A History of Korean narrative Literature, 1933),33 a pioneering historiography of Korean narrative literature, the author Kim T’aejun stressed the value of KUM in a nationalist context, exclaiming that “Kuunmong was the ultimate expression of the Chosŏn Korean people’s spiritual life, an all-encompassing mirror of the hierarchical society”,34 that the work by ← 21 | 22 → the “novelist” (sosolga 小說家)35 Kim Manjung “can be called the greatest pride of Chosŏn’s artistic world”,36 and that “Kuunmong was moreover an unparalleled masterwork, the original ancestor of dream-journey fiction and a work which, regarding content and size, stands alone as the ultimate and single representative of Korean prose literature.”37 What contributed to the heightened significance of KUM was that it represented one of the rare full-length fictional works that could doubtlessly be attributed to an individual author, with the existing texts dating back to the author’s lifetime.38 The designation of a single author and a specific time of creation distinguished KUM from many other Chosŏn dynasty works of prose fiction, and set it in line with Western masterworks which could all be attributed to an author, a genre and a specific time of creation. In addition to that, James S. Gale’s 1922 English translation of the work, printed in London, contributed to the reconfiguration of the modern Korean perception of KUM, as The Cloud Dream of the Nine singled KUM out as the first piece of Korean fiction worthy of being brought to the attention of an English-speaking Western audience.39 Hence, in the late 1920s, KUM was recognized and published in the West,40 but, as Myoungin Yu has also demonstrated,41 the treatment of KUM by ← 22 | 23 → Japanese scholars of the time was also of importance within the realm of the shifting Korean understanding of the work’s value. For instance, Japanese translations of KUM were published in Korea42 and Japan,43 respectively. Furthermore, the influential Japanese scholar Takahashi Tōru 高橋亨 (1878–1967), professor for Korean literature at Keijō Imperial University (KIU) from 1926 to 1939 and an expert not only on literature but also on Korean Buddhism and Confucianism, is known to have valued the work highly with regards to its literary quality and religious depth.44 Takahashi Tōru even taught KUM at KIU within the framework of a seminar entitled Chosŏn munhak yŏnsŭp (Practicing Korean Literature; Japanese: Chōsen bungaku rensyū) around the year 1929.45 His research into and high evaluation of KUM is in turn likely to have had a strong influence on Kim T’aejun, who attended KIU as a student of Chinese studies during this time, and subsequently in 1930 penned Chosŏn sosŏlsa, the historiography of literature which fixed KUM as the epitome of Korean narrative literature.46 Hence, ← 23 | 24 → from the late 1920s on, the perception and evaluation of KUM was in motion, as the work evolved from a piece of trivial premodern prose fiction to the greatest masterpiece of a national Korean history of literature.

As was seen above, Ch’oe Namsŏn, who until the late 1920s stood at the forefront of those Korean intellectuals keen on emphasizing the high standards of native premodern Korean literature as well as the decidedly Korean core of premodern literature,47 also believed Kim Manjung’s work a prime example of Korean national literature. In one article, Ch’oe stated: “Representative works [of premodern Korean literature] such as Kuunmong or Sa-ssi namjŏnggi were yet again Literary Chinese in their original, and in later periods such works as Ongnumong or Ongnyŏnmong appeared, which enjoyed great popularity”48. Ch’oe thus points to the fact that KUM served as the literary foundation for popular follow-up works during the late Chosŏn dynasty. The same aspect is mentioned in an article entitled “Chosŏn sosŏlsa” 朝鮮小說史 (History of Korean narrative Literature)49 by Yi Kwangsu:

Kim Manjung’s […] Kuunmong and Sa-ssi namjŏnggi: since their original editions were, of course, [composed] in Literary Chinese, someone from later times will have translated them into vernacular Korean, but when this happened, and who the translator was ← 24 | 25 → remains unknown. The han’gŭl translation of Kuunmong had a great influence on the history of Korean narrative literature. Dr. [James S.] Gale said that he had never before seen a novel describing the life of East Asians and the East Asians’ view of life as beautifully as [Kuunmong]. The size of this novel is enormous, the sentences are elegant, yet the content is Chinese. […] Countless storybooks which appeared hereafter all belong to the Kuunmong-kind.50

As can already be sensed in this passage by Yi Kwangsu, who calls the novels modelled after KUM iyagi ch’aek 이야기冊, “storybooks”, some of these KUM-based works were regarded in a less favorable manner by the historians of a national Korean literature. While KUM itself was increasingly venerated, KUM-based texts composed in Literary Chinese such as Ongninmong 玉麟夢 (The Dream of the Jade Unicorn), Ongnyŏnmong 玉蓮夢 (The Dream of the Jade Lotus) or Ongnumong – were partly devalued due to their alleged overly-pronounced dependence on Chinese foundations. For instance, with regards to Ongnumong, which is today generally believed to have been written by Nam Yŏngno 南永魯 (1810–1857), Kim T’aejun writes:

Concerning the author of Ongnumong, it is also not fixed [who he actually was], for, firstly, it was transmitted that the work was written by Nam Ikhun [南益熏, 1640–1693], and, secondly, it was also transmitted that it was written by some Advanced Scholar Hong. Perhaps, if one was to say that it is a work by Nam Ikhun, his lifespan – as he lived during the reigns of Hyŏnjong and Sukchong – would have coincided with [the time of creation of] Kuunmong. However, since Kuunmong was at the very beginning a novel written in han’gŭl it has value as a piece of national literature,51 so one cannot compare it to Ongnumong [which was written in hanmun].52 ← 25 | 26 →

This negative evaluation of KUM-based works perceived to have been written in Literary Chinese has to be considered in a historic context, for when faced with colonial aggression, nationalist Korean intellectuals tried to prove the independence and uniqueness of Korea’s cultural heritage by different means, as for example through the accentuation of allegedly purely native Korean literature and the devaluation of intertextual ties between premodern Chinese and Chosŏn Korean literature. Much earlier, in his influential articles on literature, Munhak-ŭi kach’i (The value of literature, 1910) and Munhak iran hao (What is literature?, 1916), Yi Kwangsu had already advocated a concept of Korean literature that only included works written in vernacular Korean, stating that “Koreans have long thought that Literary Chinese is the only written language, and this is the reason that literature could not develop in Korea”, and that “Korean literature designates only something written in Korean”.53 In the 1930s, when KUM experienced a rise in status in a nationalist context, the fact that the work was extant in a number of premodern vernacular Korean editions was of great significance. Accordingly, in Chosŏn sosŏlsa Kim T’aejun evaluated vernacular Korean KUM-based works positively, while dismissing KUM-based novels composed in Literary Chinese as insignificant, non-Korean products of an ivory-tower-like, Sino-centric high culture that was allegedly far removed from the “general public”:

Fifty or sixty years after the dream-journey novel Kuunmong had come out in Korea, in China (Qing dynasty) an elegant literatus by the name of Cao Xueqin wrote the masterpiece of world literature Hongloumeng (also called Shitouji [The Story of the Stone]). Then there appeared a number of imitations [mobangjak 模倣作] which all took Hongloumeng as their earliest ancestor […]. In Korea, works which took Kuunmong as their progenitor, its adaptations [pŏnan 飜案], were likewise very popular up to the time of Yŏngjo and Chŏngjo, and novels such as Ongninmong, Ongnyŏnmong or Ongnumong were produced in large numbers. However, they were altogether recorded in Chinese and among them there were also works which those scholars of Chinese [hanhakcha 漢學者] wrote in such a Chinese fashion that they actually do not differ from what some Chinese person would have written. Thick is their Chinese stench, and maybe they would have been considered a success as works of Chinese literature, but viewed from the standpoint of Korean narrative literature they do not bear any great significance, as the general public, which did not understand Chinese characters, did not have any relation to these works whatsoever and thus even their actual existence was not widely known. Moreover, in a Confucian country where novels were generally looked upon as snakes and scorpions [i.e. in a scornful, dismissive way], in Korea’s scholarly ← 26 | 27 → circles which neglected names of writers […], would they have known who the author of Chinese character novels, which appeared to them like another mountain’s rocks, might have been?54

However problematic this statement, it again illustrates that, just as in late Imperial China where there appeared a multitude of xushu 續書 (Korean: soksŏ), i.e. rewritings of and sequels to some of the major works of narrative fiction, there also existed a number of works based on and modelled after Kim Manjung’s KUM in late Chosŏn dynasty Korea, the majority of which were written anonymously. In the light of these late Chosŏn dynasty KUM-based works of prose fiction, KUM itself can be considered a text in motion, a novel that was frequently reconfigured, transformed, and which served as the foundation for new works of narrative literature. Consequently, KUM is not only noteworthy with respect to its role in the realm of the development and establishment of a national tradition of literature, it is also highly interesting within the framework of a discussion of intertextuality and parodic writings produced in late Chosŏn dynasty Korea.

1.2   Concepts and objectives

In the study of literature, intertextuality – a term coined by Julia Kristeva in the late 1960s – has become essential. Intertextuality refers to the presence of literary “intertexts” and refers to anything that links one creative work to another,55 or the multiple ways in which any one literary text is made up of other texts, by means of its open or covert citations and allusions, its repetitions and transformations of the formal and substantive features of earlier texts.56 Over the past decades, established ideas about the reading and interpretation of texts have been challenged, as texts, whether they be of a literary or non-literary nature, have come ← 27 | 28 → to be regarded not in their singularity, but rather in relation to other texts. Here, reading becomes a process of moving between texts, and meaning accordingly becomes something that exists between a specific text and all the other texts it refers and relates to. The focus has shifted from the detached, independent work towards a network of textual relations.57 The term intertextuality, which despite its prominent role in contemporary literary studies is still difficult to grasp and define,58 was developed as part of the post-structuralist challenge to accepted notions of the originality and authority of authorship, and the assumption that it is possible to read texts objectively, and to uncover a textual meaning that remains stable over time.59 Central are therefore dialogical textual relations, the ways in which certain texts were written and read in relation to precursor works. Julia Kristeva stated that “any text is the absorption and transformation of another”, and she defined intertextuality as a “mosaic of quotations”,60 while it has also ← 28 | 29 → been pointed out that, since the word text has the same etymology as texture, one may understand a written work of literature as an ongoing interweaving of various strands of storytelling, image and symbol, and historical and cultural tradition.61 Intertextuality is consequently not static but dynamic: over time, readers discover new relations among texts past and present,62 and these readers can in turn become creators of literature themselves, weaving together different threads to form a new fabric.

Details

Pages
280
Year
2017
ISBN (ePUB)
9783631712429
ISBN (PDF)
9783653072570
ISBN (MOBI)
9783631712436
ISBN (Hardcover)
9783631681213
DOI
10.3726/b11823
Language
English
Publication date
2017 (September)
Keywords
Chosŏn Korea Readership awareness Intertextuality Book market Literature
Published
Frankfurt am Main, Bern, Bruxelles, New York, Oxford, Warszawa, Wien, 2017. 280 pp., 3 b/w ill., 2 b/w tables

Biographical notes

Dennis Wuerthner (Author)

Dennis Wuerthner is a researcher and lecturer at the Korean Studies Institute of Ruhr-University Bochum (Germany). He studies and translates premodern and contemporary Korean literature.

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Title: A Study of Hypertexts of «Kuunmong» 九雲夢, Focusing on «Kuullu» 九雲樓 / «Kuun’gi» 九雲記
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