서울대학교

안녕하세요,

규장각한국학연구원에서 < 2023 해외 한국학 저자특강 시리즈: 제2강 >을 개최합니다.

제목: Language and Truth in North Korea
일시: 2023년 5월 12일 금요일, 10:00 - 12:00
저자: Sonia Ryang (라이스대학)
사회: Olga Fedorenko (서울대학교)
토론: Minkyu Sung (UNIST), 김한상 (아주대)

본 특강은 영어로 진행되는 온라인 행사입니다. 사전등록 링크를 통해 참가신청을 해주시면 행사 하루 전에 Zoom 접속링크를 보내드립니다.
- 링크: https://forms.gle/EWWFFJN82EsNUqsU7

기타 문의사항은 icks@snu.ac.kr (Tel. 02-880-9378)로 연락주시기 바랍니다.


Dear All,

The International Center for Korean Studies of the Kyujanggak Institute is hosting a Book Talk series, introducing Sonia Ryang’s Language and Truth in North Korea.

Title: Language and Truth in North Korea
Date: May 12 (Friday) 10:00 - 12:00 (Seoul)
Author: Sonia Ryang (Rice University)
Moderator: Olga Fedorenko (Seoul National University)
Discussants: Minkyu Sung (UNIST), Han Sang Kim (Ajou University)

About the Author:
Sonia Ryang is the T.T. and W.F. Professor of Asian Studies in Rice University. Trained as a social anthropologist (PhD, Cambridge), Ryang studies language and ideology, romantic love and love's function in social mobilization, food and gastronomic ethnography, and the process by which truth emerges and is sustained in a society. She is the author and editor of a total of eleven books including Reading North Korea: An Ethnological Inquiry (Harvard, 2012), Eating Korean in America: Gastronomic Ethnography of Authenticity (Hawaii, 2015), and Language and Truth in North Korea (Hawaii, 2021).

About the Book:
In this innovative and persuasive volume, Sonia Ryang offers new ways to think about North Korea and how truth emerges over decades from within a dominant discourse. It explores four discrete yet mutually related domains of discourse: North Korea’s literary purge of the 1950s?1960s; its state-initiated linguistic reforms of the 1960s?1980s; stories from a people’s chronicle, more than one hundred volumes in length, documenting interactions with the Great Leader, Kim Il Sung; and the multivolume memoirs of the Great Leader himself, published in the 1990s. These texts are heterogeneous in terms of authorship, style, purpose, and genre, and many have never before been explored in Anglophone studies of North Korea. All have contributed to consolidating a North Korean regime of truth, bringing into existence a set of assumptions and shared understandings that have been regarded as true over the last half century.
Basing her work on a study of these linguistic and discursive domains, Ryang explores the ways in which power, truth, and self are indissolubly connected by function as well as efficacy and how language plays a key role in sustaining their validity. The Kim Il Sung era, from 1945 to Kim’s death in 1994, forms the basis of the book, but the way truth emerged and was sustained during these decades provide important insight into how we can comprehend North Korea today. Rather than view the country as an ideological entity in order to expose its falsehood, so to speak, thinking critically about what it sees as true yields a far more productive outcome for scholarly analysis as well as general understanding.
Language and Truth in North Korea will find a ready audience among those interested in North Korea from a wide variety of disciplines, including the social sciences, history, philosophy, and theology.

The event will be held online via Zoom. The link for Zoom meeting will be sent a day before the event after your registration is confirmed
- Register: https://forms.gle/EWWFFJN82EsNUqsU7

Please contact icks@snu.ac.kr (Tel. 02-880-9378) for more information.