TY  - JOUR
T1  - Translating Affect: Aura in Kim Sowŏl’s Poetry
AU  - Choi, Ann Y. 
JO  - Academia Koreana
PY  - 2005
DA  - 2005/1/1
DO  - 
KW  - early modern poetry
KW  - lyric
KW  - han
KW  - aura
KW  - female voice
AB  - 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.