Ann Y. Choi

early modern poetry lyric han aura female voice

This article examines Kim Sowŏl’s (1903-1934) lyric poetry as it relates to Walter Benjamin’s notion of aura as “affective charge” associated with cult value and appeal to solidarity. I trace the poetic language in Sowŏl’s works as emanating from a female voice that produces pathos, simultaneously opposing the logos of colonial rule and promoting the logic of the Confucian humanism of Korea’s past. As a type of poetry looking back to an oral culture, i.e., “folk poetry”, these poems can be read in two ways: on the one hand, as works capturing the familiar sounds of a dying era, and, thus auratic; on the other, as fixed reproductions of an already bygone era trying to resuscitate the aura which has vanished. I argue that the poet’s position of both economic and socio-political disadvantage as a colonial subject channels affect into han, the ritualized aesthetic marker for foreclosed desire.