“Between, Through, and Across: Transmedial Modes and Methods” (10 a.m. - 12 p.m., Saturday, April 23) reflects on the potential for transmedial models of cultural production to generate new approaches to modern and contemporary literature across East Asia. Yoon Jeong Oh examines the critical dialogues between translingual literatures and transmedial arts through the “transmedial translations” of colonial-era Korean writer Yi Sang’s work from self-translated bilingual writing to contemporary multimedia presentation. Susan Dan Su investigates the Tibetan-language literature website Chömé, which drew on print and online literature to create a Tibetan cultural space that was simultaneously facilitated and hindered by state-led infrastructural development and cultural management policies. Ethan Waddell considers the migration of language and poetic form from recorded sound to printed text through the dissemination of the trot song “Camelia girl” (1964) by Yi Mi-ja into the literary imagination of South Korean writers. Renren Yang analyzes the work and techniques of celebrity novelist, blogger, and film director Han Han to demonstrate the centrality of both printed pages and electronic screens in Han Han's celebrity as well as in his disruption of the “cult of mobility, connectivity, and portability” in contemporary China.
Discussant: Hoyt Long (University of Chicago)
- “Dialogic Space of Translation: From Translingual Poetry of Colonial Korea to Contemporary Transmedial Arts” by Yoon Jeong Oh (New York University)
- “The New Era of Digital and Print: The Third Generation’s Transmedial Interventions into China’s Cultural Regime” by Susan Dan Su (University of Chicago)
- “The Elegiac Imagination: Tracing Yi Mi-ja and Trot through Literature” by Ethan Waddell (University of Chicago)
- “From Printed Pages to Electronic Screens: Han Han’s Lyricism and Cynicism” by Renren Yang (University of British Columbia)