The Pan-Asian Empire and World Literatures

In her article The Pan-Asian Empire and World Literatures Sowon S. Park argues that world literature studies have been limited to Europe and its Others. That is to say, while there has been an increasing preoccupation with literary networks beyond the Western canon since the middle of the last century, the investigations have been restricted to the colonial world and the postcolonial states of the Western powers. The non-Western colonial field of the Pan-Asian empire (1894-1945) — Imperial Japan, colonial Korea, semi-colonial China, and Taiwan — has been not so much relegated to the margins as just passed over. Park recalibrates the dynamics of the West and the rest and center/periphery models of world literature by bringing an East Asian perspective to the discussion and presents an atypical model that expands the radius, as well as challenges certain accepted norms

An Unknown Masterpiece: On Pak Kyongni's Land and World Literature

This article explores some of the issues that prevent the existence of a more diverse canon in the field of world literature. It discusses extra-literary issues that have been effectively displaced onto the question of literary quality and outlines some of the concrete hurdles that face minority literatures, with reference to the literature of modern East Asia (China, Korea and Japan). The final section examines Pak Kyongni’sLand(1969–1994), a novel virtually unknown outside of Korea but revered there as the national epic. The discussion of a work that is regarded as ‘the best that has been thought and said in the world’ by one nation yet remains practically unknown to the world will bring to the fore issues of ranking and status produced by the ‘worldification’ of literatures. In the process, it will consider some of the dynamics between nationality and universality, the relations between literature and nation, and what it means for literatures to be in dialogue when literatures and literary histories have been defined along national lines