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The Promise of (Un)happiness: 34 Literature and Yi Si-u's Surrealist Poetics in Colonial Korea

The Promise of (Un)happiness: 34 Literature and Yi Si-u's Surrealist Poetics in Colonial Korea This article examines Korean surrealism—the avant‐garde movement most explicitly preoccupied with questions of the psyche and subjectification within an historical context of colonial unfreedom—through attention to the short‐lived journal Samsa munhak 三四文學 (34 Literature, 1934–37) and its most representative poet, Yi Si‐u 李時雨. Drawing from psychoanalysis and affect theory, it addresses Yi Si‐u's scholarly underexamined but substantive meditations on the constitution of the subject, desire, and repression, focusing specifically on the question of (un)happiness and its implications for psychic and political freedom in a colonial climate of despair only partially brightened by the allure of the commodity. The author aims to demonstrate how Yi's surrealist refraction of subjective desire both registers the sociopolitical pressures of his historical context as well as negatively conceptualizes a liberated form of happiness at odds with the standardized variant administered by the hegemonic colonial authority. As such, the dialectical inseparability of collective liberation from psychosocial repression and the individual pursuit of happiness can become legible, an insight that may contribute to current theorizations of affect, commodification, and emancipatory movements. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png positions asia critique Duke University Press

The Promise of (Un)happiness: 34 Literature and Yi Si-u's Surrealist Poetics in Colonial Korea

positions asia critique , Volume 30 (4) – Nov 1, 2022

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References (51)

Copyright
Copyright 2022 by Duke University Press
ISSN
1067-9847
eISSN
1527-8271
DOI
10.1215/10679847-9967292
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

This article examines Korean surrealism—the avant‐garde movement most explicitly preoccupied with questions of the psyche and subjectification within an historical context of colonial unfreedom—through attention to the short‐lived journal Samsa munhak 三四文學 (34 Literature, 1934–37) and its most representative poet, Yi Si‐u 李時雨. Drawing from psychoanalysis and affect theory, it addresses Yi Si‐u's scholarly underexamined but substantive meditations on the constitution of the subject, desire, and repression, focusing specifically on the question of (un)happiness and its implications for psychic and political freedom in a colonial climate of despair only partially brightened by the allure of the commodity. The author aims to demonstrate how Yi's surrealist refraction of subjective desire both registers the sociopolitical pressures of his historical context as well as negatively conceptualizes a liberated form of happiness at odds with the standardized variant administered by the hegemonic colonial authority. As such, the dialectical inseparability of collective liberation from psychosocial repression and the individual pursuit of happiness can become legible, an insight that may contribute to current theorizations of affect, commodification, and emancipatory movements.

Journal

positions asia critiqueDuke University Press

Published: Nov 1, 2022

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