Shamanic Chant and Contemporary Korean Elegy: Kim Hyesoon's "Autobiography of Death"

An extended period of public mourning followed the 2014 Sewol Ferry disaster, one of South Korea’s largest maritime disasters which resulted in over three hundred passenger deaths. This talk examines leading contemporary South Korean poet Kim Hyesoon’s narration of collective trauma in her elegy for the dead, Chugŭmŭi chasajŏn (Autobiography of Death, 2016). Drawing on the oral tradition, particularly the songs of female shamans, Kim facilitates a radical empathy with which her speaker enters the physical bodies of the dead and invokes their spirits.Kim’s polyvocal speaker traverses historical memory to excavate these deaths: Autobiography of Death connects the recent loss of life involved in the sinking of the Sewol Ferry with the structural injustice experienced by dissidents who were killed during South Korea’s democratization movement. I argue that Kim places her elegy in the public sphere by engaging the embodied memory of individuals to voice the transhistorical grief of the Korean community.    

Ivanna Sang Een Yi is an Assistant Professor of Korea Studies at Cornell University. As a scholar of Korean literature, culture, and performance, her research focuses on the performative dimensions of living oral traditions as they interact with written literature and the environment from the late Chosŏn period to the present. Her current book project, Voices Inscribed by Land: Continuing Orality and the Environment in Korean Literature, examines the flourishing of Korean oral traditions such as p'ansori (epic dramatic storytelling) and sijo (lyric poetry) through transformative encounters with writing, the environment, and recording technology. The monograph engages Indigenous perspectives and theories from the Americas to illuminate ways in which land has been treated as a sentient interlocutor rather than a commodity by Korean singers and writers both before and after the rise of global capitalism. Before coming to Cornell, she was a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder and a Korea Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at Washington University in St. Louis.