Paper accepted at "ENGLISH and ASIA: First International Conference on Language and Linguistics 2008"

In world-record time the folks at this conference got back to me and accepted my proposal for a presentation on Kim Yong-ik. This is in Malaysia around the time of my birthday and the only possible snag is if BPU will let me get away for it.

Well, I'll quit if they don't, really. This is a paper about a Korean author by the employee of a Korean University. I'm part of the wave, baby! ;-)

And it is pretty inexpensive to get there. The conference is 200,000 won and if I were (unlikely) able to get the whole week off the whole thing (flight and hotel inclusive) would be about 1.3 million won.

Not bad for a vacation and work trip.

ah... the rather poor (I have to start writing these things sooner than the day of the deadline) abstract is here:

Kim Yong Ik: Unimagining “Asian American” Through English

Kim Yong-Ik, a Korean by birth and English writer by trade attempted to avoid questions of empire, orientalization, language and literary theory by declaring autonomy from them. Kim was avowedly anti-political, extra-theoretical, and purposefully resistant to ethnic, political or theoretical placement. Kim publicly argued that his work was not concerned with contested terrains, and purposefully wrote in a dispassionate and narratively simple and concrete style. His writings, antithetically to his confessed approach, obsessively concerned themselves with issues attendant to cultural clash: oppression, the state of the outsider to the state, disconnection, diaspora, and the dream of coming to a “home” that was not contested; a home of ancestral imperials and not imperialists. This tension between language use and content essentially mirrored the tensions that Kim was describing between the United States and Korea.

Focusing on “They Won’t Crack it Open,” (The sole remaining work of Kim’s in print) this paper will discuss the arc of Kim’s individual works, literary oeuvre, career, and life and to what extent his approach gave him the freedom to write, to what extent it clashed with his written work and, finally, to what extent he found himself Occidentalized by his self-aware extra-theoretical approach.