Uchang Kim, Korea University, Republic of Korea

“Life Truth and Variation”

Carlos Castaneda’s prose work, Teachings of Don Juan: Yaqui Way of Knowledge, is a full-time prose work that stands by itself, a story describing a certain kind of experience. It originated, however, as a report on an experience of fieldwork, by the author, who was working on a doctoral dissertation in anthropology required by UCLA. Fieldwork was necessary as a kind of proof that the dissertation is based on real-world experience. But what was a testimony for the connection between the real world and the dissertation? It was published in 1985 and soon became popular among the general readership. It is often attributed to the fact that academic learning lost its prestige. But even among the general public, what has direct appeal is rather what is rendered in stories, that ism in literature, narratives, and poetry. The work allows the reader to feel the sense of personal in literature, conveying the real sense of the real world. Human agency is there, hiding or manipulating poems and stories. What is more real than our contact with the real world but seeing river or swimming in it?--no statistic of factual depiction of swimming in it--what could be more real than this physical contact? It is so natural that people would like to go on travel. It is natural that our age has become an age of tourism. Life truth is directly felt in our physical contact, but we would subsidize it with abstract description.

David Damrosch, Harvard University, USA

“Language Wars: Scriptworlds in Conflict”

Writing systems have always been prime markers of national and cultural identity, forming a “scriptworld” that is the centerpiece of a system of education and a bearer of cultural memory. Some countries treasure a national language written in a unique national script, while others have chosen a cosmopolitan writing system or have had one thrust upon them by imperial conquerors. This talk will consider the key role of writing systems in times of cultural conflict. I will begin with the consequences of the displacement of Norse runes by the Roman alphabet in medieval Iceland, and the contrasting case of the alphabet’s imposition in colonial New Spain by the conquistadors. I then turn to the shifting relations between scripts in Eastern Europe (in the rivalry of Cyrillic versus the Roman alphabet) and in Asia, as Japan, Korea, and Vietnam first adopt versions of the cosmopolitan Chinese script and then revise or reject it in the era of rising nationalism and colonial/anticolonial conflict in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In all of these cases, I will focus on the role of literature in negotiating these conflicts. Sometimes writers seek to heal these conflicts (Snorri Sturluson in Iceland), sometimes to exacerbate them (Milorad Pavić in Serbia), or employ multiple scripts (Ho Chi Minh) in the struggle for independence. Writers from Snorri Sturluson to Nguyen Du and Pak Tu-jin have meditated on what their culture has lost as well as gained in these language wars.