Science and Literature in Korea: An Introduction

Christopher P. Hanscom is associate professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of The Real Modern: Literary Modernism and the Crisis of Representation in Colonial Korea (2013), a study of theories of language and modernist fiction in 1930s colonial Korea; coeditor of The Affect of Difference: Representations of Race in East Asian Empire (2016), a collection of essays offering a new perspective on the history of race and racial ideologies in modern East Asia; and coeditor of Imperatives of Culture: Selected Essays on Korean History, Literature, and Society from the Japanese Colonial Era (2013), a collection of translations of major literary critical and historical essays from the Korean colonial period. Dafna Zur is assistant professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Stanford University. She has published articles on North Korean science fiction, the Korean War in North and South Korean children’s literature, childhood in cinema, and Korean popular culture. Her book Figuring Korean Futures: Children’s Literature in Modern Korea (2017) traces the affective investments and aspirations made possible by children’s literature in colonial and postcolonial Korea. She has published translations in wordswithoutborders.org, The Columbia Anthology of Modern Korean Short Stories, and the Asia Literary Review.