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War of Scripts: The Emergence of the Vernacular National Space during the Imjin War in Korea
Les salons de l'Inalco
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2 rue de Lille, 75007 Paris.
- 75007
Le samedi 10 mai, de 10h à 12h, au salon de l'Inalco, Prof. JaHyun Kim Haboush (Columbia University) donnera une conférence sur «War of Scripts: The Emergence of the Vernacular National Space during the Imjin War in Korea»
During the Imjin War, the Korean government adopted a radical language policy: to deploy Korean vernacular script as a means of communication among Koreans. Departing from the practice of using exclusively literary Chinese in public missives, many copies of royal edicts in Korean script were sent out either to be posted in conspicuous places where people might gather or pass, or pass by or to be widely distributed.
The vernacular national space was created at the moment of crisis in contradistinction to the transnational literary Chinese writing space that converged in Korea. With the arrival of foreign powers using literary Chinese, the domestic communicative space of literary Chinese became permeable to them. Previously, communications between these countries took place along prescribed lines, and were limited mostly to diplomatic exchanges at the state level. Thus, it was alarming for the Chosôn government that when the three countries fought in Korea, the national boundaries of communicative space vanished, and that the foreign forces penetrated into the interior of the Korean domestic literary Chinese discursive space. Nevertheless, the creation of a vernacular national space was an unprecedented and epochal measure that redefined Korea as a geo-cultural-political entity.
In this lecture, I will discuss the historical context in which the vernacular script emerged as a national communicative space. I will also follow the deepening awareness of the Chosôn government of the necessity of constructing and disseminating a sense of a separate destiny for Koreans. I will illustrate the penetration of the Korean interior literary space by the Japanese and Chinese forces, and the way in which each of the three countries viewed one another’s daily language. I will also briefly discuss the meaning and impact of the emergence of a national vernacular space in the diglossic literary culture.