The Art of Vernacular Reading in Chosŏn Korea: Kugyŏl for Memory, Eloquence, and Adornment

Language contact between Literary Sinitic and Korean gave rise to the practice of vernacular reading, whereby Literary Sinitic texts can be read as Korean using glossing practice. Attributed to Sŏl Ch’ong (655-?), who is said to have “read the Nine Classics by means of the local language and instructed younger scholars,” the method of glossing is now called kugyŏl, which is also the nomenclature for the glosses themselves. In what shape did kugyŏl exist? What can we learn about the Chosŏn culture of reading by examining surviving Korean books that bear kugyŏl? In this presentation, I argue that kugyŏl glossing was not only a linguistic intermediary for easing Koreans’ access to Literary Sinitic and for assimilation of Literary Sinitic into Korean, but also a vehicle for acquiring eloquence and for adorning texts. I will pay particular attention to the visual and acoustic interplay using specific examples from surviving specimens from Chosŏn Korea.  

Si Nae Park is Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. Park received her PhD in Asian Studies from the University of British Columbia. Park’s research examines the literature and literary practices of Chosŏn Korea within the larger context of the Sinographic Cosmopolis, with broad interests in charting the ways in which the Korean language—written, spoken, and imagined—coexisted with, mediated, and assimilated Literary Sinitic and sinographs as a shared ‘scripta franca’ of premodern East Asia. To that end, she combines textual analysis with insights from linguistic anthropology, history of the book and of reading, and history of writing. She has written on the vernacular story (yadam)genre, fiction glossaries (sosŏl ŏrokhae), and vernacularized Confucian Classics (kyŏngsŏ ŏnhae). She is a co-editor of Score One for the Dancing Girl and Other Selections from the Kimun ch’onghwa: A Story Collection from Nineteenth-Century Korea (University of Toronto Press, 2016) and author of The Korean Vernacular Story: Telling Tales of Contemporary Chosŏn in Sinographic Writing (Columbia University, 2020). Her current book project is tentatively titled Writing as Utterance: The Culture of Reading, Script, and Literature in Chosŏn Korea. She is also developing a new book-length study to explore book collecting, anthologizing, and book-list making activities to trace the emergent perceptions of ‘Korean classics’ at the turn of the twentieth century.