Wolhee Choe presents Chosun Love Poems
The title of my talk is "Chosun Love Poems," which explores the aesthetics of resignation in two 16th century Chosun poets: Hwang Jini (1506-1544) and Im Je (1549-1581). Here is a summary:
Carpe diem (seize the day) poems were rare during the Chosun Dynasty. Why didn't Chosun poets revel with love in the western sense: falling in love, loving, or falling out of love? We could conjecture that Confucian ethics that shunned passion may have limited poetic subjects to a traditional few: parting, longing, and dreaming. But such conjecture cannot fully assess the character of Chosun love poems. Here we explore instead the poetic resonance of the passive stance in lovers' separation and dreams, the stance that defies the passage of time and creates spatial time to which lovers submit; we explore the meaning of this submission in which lovers simultaneously recognize, and resign themselves into, power beyond human nature. This is why Chosun love poems tend to be more metaphysical than psychological; love has happened, but exists only as an absence, as what the lover longs for and suffers from. Such lyrical resignation precludes the drama of love—the ecstasy of the moment or the conflict of interest, but allows an expansion of the lover's consciousness and self-knowledge.
Wolhee Choe is Emerita Professor of Humanities at Polytechnic Institute of New York University. After twenty years of teaching literature, she now divides her time between writing and bookmaking for the publishing company she started with her husband in 2003. Hawks publishing specializes in books about Korean arts for English speaking readers. She is the author of "Toward an Aesthetic Criticism of Technology," "Golden Arc: The Paintings and Thought of Ucchin Chang," "Lyric Brush: Kim Wonsook's Works: 1972-2002," and co-translator of three books of poems, "Songs of the Kisaeng: Courtesan Poetry of the Last Korean Dynasty," "Day-Shine: Poems by Chung Hyunjong," "Windflower: Poems by Moon Chunghee."
The world is at home in New York. Even from its beginnings, the city was a place of encounter for a great diversity of languages and cultures. In 1643, less than forty years after the first Europeans arrived, it was reported that 18 different languages were spoken among its 500 inhabitants. Today the City is home for more than 130 languages and none of them sounds foreign here.
The Fourth Annual Multilingual New York Book Fair Expo celebrates this year the richness and diversity of the languages of New York. The academic and cultural program will present music, theatre, literary readings; and book signings showcasing authors who write their works in one of the eight most spoken languages in the City besides English. New York Book Fair Expo is proud to present a distinguished group of authors, some of them living in the States and others coming from Argentina, Colombia, India, Greece, Panama, and other corners of the world, all converging in the NY Melting Pot.
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