Ross King - "Out of the Margins: The Western Wing 西廂記 Glossarial Complex in Late Chosŏn and the Problem of the Literary Vernacular"

Ross King, Professor and Head of the Department of Asian Studies, The University of British Columbia

The title of this paper is inspired by Ge Liangyan’s (2001) study of the development of Chinese vernacular fiction. Ge’s book tackles various questions of vernacularization and the rise of a new literary vernacular in late imperial China through the lens of what he calls the “Shuihu complex” and its eventual crystallization in the Shuihu zhuan 水滸傳. But whereas Ge’s title alludes to generic and societal margins—the marginalized position of xiaoshuo 小說 narrative in traditional China and the liminal social status of the protagonists of the Water Margin—my focus here is literally on the margins of the page, whether printed or (more especially) manuscript. And my focus is on late-Chosŏn Korea (1392-1897) and its encounter with precisely the sort of literary vernacular Sinitic that Ge studies in his book. As so many researchers have noted, the terms baihua 白話 and wenyan 文言, as well as their alleged antagonism in earlier times, are twentieth-century inventions and legacies of the May Fourth movement. But how did late-Chosŏn Korean intellectuals encounter and understand this very different register of written Chinese? I approach this question through the specific case of one literary work and its reception in Korea: the Xixiangji 西廂記 or Story of the Western Wing. Moreover, I do so from the vantage point of the margins of the page: from the reading practices of glossing and commentary that lay at the very center of premodern literary culture in the Sinographic Cosmopolis and which are central to the history of vernacularization.