Yi Sang and Global Modernism

Abstract

Yi Sang (1910-1937), born Kim Haegyŏng, wrote in Korea in the early part of the twentieth century under Japanese rule, composing in both Japanese and Korean. His work has been variously labelled as Modernist, Surrealist, and Dadaist. Despite the past fifty years of Yi scholarship acknowledging his stylistic and thematic affinities with Japanese modernists, Yi has typically been read as a specifically Korean, nationalistic figure who wrote experimental works in a spirit of anti-colonial resistance. These readings, however, are complicated by the fact that Yi’s works and life exhibit no sign of such political leanings. Moving away from these interpretations, my thesis aims to answer the following questions: what does it mean that we call Yi a modernist, and what does it mean that his works are similar to those of his Japanese and Western modernist contemporaries? To answer these questions I invite Yi into the methodological context of Global Modernism, a theoretical perspective that has recently emerged from New Modernist Studies. By examining Yi’s relationship to other Japanese modernists such as Yasunari Kawabata (1899-1972), Chika Sagawa (1911-1936), Kōbō Abe (1924-1993), and Osamu Dazai (1909-1948), and to Western modernists such as T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), and James Joyce (1882-1941), I demonstrate that Yi is a modernist who is better understood internationally, whose significance ramifies beyond strictly national concerns. The goal of this thesis is to highlight the contributions Yi made to Korean, East Asian, and global modernisms, and to raise awareness of Korean modernism as an international movement that is crucial to contemporary understandings of global modernism.