Articles (Peer-Reviewed) by Yugon Kim
The Korean Association for Feminist Studies in English Literature, 2022
This essay explores how Asian American poet Mei-mei
Berssenbrugge’s experimental lyric poem Endoc... more This essay explores how Asian American poet Mei-mei
Berssenbrugge’s experimental lyric poem Endocrinology narrates and
responds to the environmental crisis by synthesizing science and
poetry. Part memoir, part scientific observation, Endocrinology vividly
describes the poet’s personal experience of environmental illness after
she was accidentally exposed to a toxic pesticide near her place.
Reading Endocrinology with Stacy Alaimo’s concept of
“trans-corporeality,” I argue that Berssenbrugge reconceptualizes the
body, especially women’s bodies affected by environmental illness, as
a trans-corporeal space in which the relationship between human and
nonhuman is entangled and affects each other. To illuminate various
aspects of environmental risks that permeate our daily lives,
Berssenbrugge not only critiques rigid categories between nature and
culture, but also seeks to broaden the scope of feminist literature
beyond human agency by highlighting the intersections of
environmental and gender issues. Navigating the boundaries between
the biomedical understanding of environmental risks and the sensory
perception of the toxic body, this essay finally suggests that
Berssenbrugge’s ecofeminist imagination helps readers to develop arts
of noticing in our moment of crisis.
Studies in Modern British and American Poetry, 2021
This paper explores how American poet Philip Whalen has sought
to expand the Beat Generation’s co... more This paper explores how American poet Philip Whalen has sought
to expand the Beat Generation’s counterculture poetics in the 1950s by
utilizing Japanese Buddhist philosopher D.T. Suzuki’s modern Zen
theory. For Whalen, Suzukian Zen, especially its emphasis on Zen as
everydayness and freedom, provided a critical aesthetic principle as he
tried to challenge the idea of cultural conformity largely mandated by
Cold War US ideologies. By closely reading his early Buddhist poems
such as “Harangue from Newport” (1957), “A Reflection on My Own
Times” (1959), and “NEFAS” (1966), I show the ways in which
Whalen enacted what Jack Kerouac calls “spiritual emancipation,” a
term that highlights the essence of the Beat spirit against US
nationalism and Cold War containment culture in the mid-twentieth
century. In doing so, I ultimately suggest that Whalen’s Buddhist
poetry creates an open space of dialogue and social criticism between
those who have engaged in American counterculture movement.
Institute of British and American Studies, 2021
Due to the threat of COVID-19, many colleges and universities have recently begun
to offer onlin... more Due to the threat of COVID-19, many colleges and universities have recently begun
to offer online classes to help prevent the spread of the coronavirus. Online education
in the age of the pandemic can be best described what Charles Hodges calls
“Emergency Remote Teaching” (ERT), a term that suggests the paradigm shift of
instructional delivery during a crisis. This paper provides a case study that shows the
challenges of teaching English literature online in South Korea. The move to ERT
requires that instructors take more control of the course design and implementation
process, but at the same time, they have varying levels of digital fluency, especially
in the use of educational tools for distant learning. By sharing my experience of
teaching English literature course with emerging digital learning tools such as Zoom
Whiteboard, Slido, and Mindmeister, this paper highlights the importance of online
teaching pedagogies in order to promote student interaction in the virtual classroom
and manage effective collaborative learning. Ultimately, I suggest a “pedagogy of
care” for online literature education in South Korea, emphasizing that instructors
should be more attentive to students who have experienced various social, economic,
and emotional challenges in this uncertain time.
The Journal of Criticism and Theory, 2020
This essay examines D.T. Suzuki’s Zen philosophy, paying close attention to how his Zen theory af... more This essay examines D.T. Suzuki’s Zen philosophy, paying close attention to how his Zen theory affected the Beat writers and their counterculture in the mid-twentieth century. Suzuki’s major work such as An Introduction to Zen Buddhism, Essays in Zen Buddhism, and Manual of Zen Buddhism served as a significant conduit when the Beat writers studied and integrated Buddhist thought into writing. Suzuki’s impact on the Beat literature demonstrates what Yunte Huang calls “transpacific displacement,” a term that illuminates the irreducible complexities of literary and cultural interactions among countries on the Pacific Rim. In this context, the distinctive feature of Suzukian Zen is discussed in two overlapping terms: “everydayness” and “freedom.” These two terms help understand why the Beat writers such as Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder were so committed, particularly in their early work, to Suzuki’s Zen philosophy as a means to rebel against the Cold War United States. Ultimately, by analyzing Suzuki’s work and its creative transformations in the Beat literary scene, this paper suggests that Asian philosophy should be seen as a socially situated and discursively constructed artifact, i.e., an open signifier that can appear in any intellectual and aesthetic context across time and space.
Studies in British and American Language and Literature , 2018
This paper explores Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Daoist imagination, suggesting that Daoism serves as ... more This paper explores Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Daoist imagination, suggesting that Daoism serves as an important conduit for her literary innovation. While she engaged with the orthodox (i.e., Laozi/Zhuangzi’s text-based Chinese) Daoist philosophy and aesthetics, she regarded Daoism as a kind of nomadic spiritual tradition that allows the postmodern idea of writing as openness and inclusion. To show Cha’s Daoist influence in the 1970s, I examine her performance artwork "Audience Distant Relative" along with her M.F.A. thesis titled “Paths” where she explains how to flesh out the idea of dao (道) or “the way.” Attesting to Roland Barthes’s idea of the “writerly text” and Walter Benjamin’s concept of the “storyteller,” Cha’s Daoist work urges us to be more open and inclusive to the external world, and eventually to conceive of the world in a holistic way.
Arizona Quarterly, Jul 2016
This paper examines Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s feminist lyric poetry and poetics, focusing on how he... more This paper examines Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s feminist lyric poetry and poetics, focusing on how her writing explores the middle ground between French feminism and the Mahayana lineage of Chinese Buddhism. While scholars have discussed Berssenbrugge’s feminist consciousness and its impacts on her innovative lyric practice, little attention has been given to her life-long involvement in the Chinese Buddhist tradition. In this respect, this essay traces the development of her feminist-Buddhist (or Buddhist-feminist) writing from the 1980s through 1990s, suggesting that the Chinese Buddhist bodhisattva Guanyin, a popular female deity known as the “Goddess of Compassion,” plays a significant role when Berssenbrugge yields an antiessential form of feminist ethics. Berssenbrugge’s transnational feminist imaginary seeks to promote Guanyin’s ethics of compassion, an ethics that fleshes out the bodhisattva’s maternity and her openness to the suffering other.
English Language and Literature, Mar 2016
This paper investigates the social function of William Shakespeare’s plays in nineteenth-century ... more This paper investigates the social function of William Shakespeare’s plays in nineteenth-century America, focusing on how Shakespearean eloquence served to promote the abolitionist movement. While many scholars discuss the significant contribution Shakespearean education made to the formation of early America’s cultural homogeneity and social unity, little attention has been paid to the historical fact that Shakespeare’s work also involved in fostering various political debates, especially when civic leaders criticized social injustice such as racial slavery. In this respect, this essay examines a selection of abolitionist texts from William Lloyd Garrison, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, and William Wells Brown, suggesting that these four prominent abolitionists used Shakespeare as a means to legitimize their egalitarian ideals and, in turn, contest American democracy in its flawed state. Conceived as a symbol for egalitarian social change in the revolutionary period, Shakespeare’s plays helped facilitate the abolitionist movement that made it possible to envision the future of American democracy in a more ethical way.
The New Korean Journal of English Language and Literature, Jun 2016
This paper examines Geoffrey Chaucer’s feminist imagination, focusing on how his female character... more This paper examines Geoffrey Chaucer’s feminist imagination, focusing on how his female characters involve in challenging stereotyped gender depictions. Since the 1980s, many scholars have discussed Chaucer from a feminist perspective, suggesting that he was a protofeminist poet whose vivid representation of women was meant to defy patriarchal gender relations. The scholars, however, focus mostly on Chaucer’s mature work such as The Canterbury Tales, and implicitly claim that women are not a major subject of his early work. While gender issues are central to his poetic imagination, his early dream visions such as The Book of the Duchess, The Parliament of Fowls, and Troilus and Criseyde did not garner much critical attention in relation to his feminist literary practice. In this respect, this paper traces Chaucer’s development of his early female characters by showing how they change from ghosts to human subjects, from voiceless objects to eloquent narrators.
Studies in Modern British and American Poetry, Dec 2015
This paper investigates William Carlos Williams’s In the American Grain (1925), a collection of e... more This paper investigates William Carlos Williams’s In the American Grain (1925), a collection of essays on American history, in which the poet argues that American Puritanism and its Eurocentric worldview play a most crucial role in attempting to stabilize a unitary notion of American cultural identity. Reading Williams’s essays through the critical lens of Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy, this study seeks to explore his development of an anti-Puritan stance toward a locality-based literary practice. Ultimately, Williams’s transatlantic historical imaginary is read here as corresponding to his own drive to promote a life-affirming Dionysian (Nietzschean) poetics, a poetics grounded in the direct experience of local cultures.
Dissertation by Yugon Kim
This dissertation contributes to the newly emerging research field of Transpacific Studies, whose... more This dissertation contributes to the newly emerging research field of Transpacific Studies, whose interdisciplinary approach is meant to shed light on the dynamic interactions between countries on the Pacific Rim. Reflecting this transpacific turn in academic research, I examine four contemporary American poets whose literary innovations are rooted in the Buddhist and Daoist lineages of Asian philosophy. While examining the chosen poets’ texts as heterocultural forms of East-West dialogue, I criticize previous reading models that often dismiss the Western transformation of Asian sources simply as “inauthentic,” “fictional,” or even “orientalist fantasy.” American avant-garde poetry, I argue, can be read more productively when we consider it as a radically contextual space in which foreign signifiers are leaping, curving, clashing, resounding, and displacing themselves boundlessly. Referring to such a non-hierarchical, palimpsestic textual space, I propose “a poetics of the radical middle,” a term I draw from the Buddhist concept of sunyata or “emptiness.” Ultimately, through the experimental texts of four American poets, I seek to provide a new reading model for transnational literary studies by taking the transpacific as an important site for literary innovation. While complementing recent studies on transpacific American literature and culture, my work goes beyond them in investigating the positive social changes that poetic texts can promote as we reconceive nation, citizenship, racial identity, ethnic diversity, and gender equality.
Translations by Yugon Kim
Korean title: "이것은 시를 위한 강의가 아니다" ("this is not just a lecture for poetry"), 2017
This is the first complete Korean translation of E.E. Cummings's "i: six nonlectures," a collecti... more This is the first complete Korean translation of E.E. Cummings's "i: six nonlectures," a collection of his talks on life and poetry in the early 1950s, given at Harvard University as part of the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures. The Korean title is "이것은 시를 위한 강의가 아니다" (literally, "this is not just a lecture for poetry"). For more information about this book, visit <http://minumsa.minumsa.com/book/11539/>
Papers by Yugon Kim
The Criticism and Theory Society of Korea, 2021
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Articles (Peer-Reviewed) by Yugon Kim
Berssenbrugge’s experimental lyric poem Endocrinology narrates and
responds to the environmental crisis by synthesizing science and
poetry. Part memoir, part scientific observation, Endocrinology vividly
describes the poet’s personal experience of environmental illness after
she was accidentally exposed to a toxic pesticide near her place.
Reading Endocrinology with Stacy Alaimo’s concept of
“trans-corporeality,” I argue that Berssenbrugge reconceptualizes the
body, especially women’s bodies affected by environmental illness, as
a trans-corporeal space in which the relationship between human and
nonhuman is entangled and affects each other. To illuminate various
aspects of environmental risks that permeate our daily lives,
Berssenbrugge not only critiques rigid categories between nature and
culture, but also seeks to broaden the scope of feminist literature
beyond human agency by highlighting the intersections of
environmental and gender issues. Navigating the boundaries between
the biomedical understanding of environmental risks and the sensory
perception of the toxic body, this essay finally suggests that
Berssenbrugge’s ecofeminist imagination helps readers to develop arts
of noticing in our moment of crisis.
to expand the Beat Generation’s counterculture poetics in the 1950s by
utilizing Japanese Buddhist philosopher D.T. Suzuki’s modern Zen
theory. For Whalen, Suzukian Zen, especially its emphasis on Zen as
everydayness and freedom, provided a critical aesthetic principle as he
tried to challenge the idea of cultural conformity largely mandated by
Cold War US ideologies. By closely reading his early Buddhist poems
such as “Harangue from Newport” (1957), “A Reflection on My Own
Times” (1959), and “NEFAS” (1966), I show the ways in which
Whalen enacted what Jack Kerouac calls “spiritual emancipation,” a
term that highlights the essence of the Beat spirit against US
nationalism and Cold War containment culture in the mid-twentieth
century. In doing so, I ultimately suggest that Whalen’s Buddhist
poetry creates an open space of dialogue and social criticism between
those who have engaged in American counterculture movement.
to offer online classes to help prevent the spread of the coronavirus. Online education
in the age of the pandemic can be best described what Charles Hodges calls
“Emergency Remote Teaching” (ERT), a term that suggests the paradigm shift of
instructional delivery during a crisis. This paper provides a case study that shows the
challenges of teaching English literature online in South Korea. The move to ERT
requires that instructors take more control of the course design and implementation
process, but at the same time, they have varying levels of digital fluency, especially
in the use of educational tools for distant learning. By sharing my experience of
teaching English literature course with emerging digital learning tools such as Zoom
Whiteboard, Slido, and Mindmeister, this paper highlights the importance of online
teaching pedagogies in order to promote student interaction in the virtual classroom
and manage effective collaborative learning. Ultimately, I suggest a “pedagogy of
care” for online literature education in South Korea, emphasizing that instructors
should be more attentive to students who have experienced various social, economic,
and emotional challenges in this uncertain time.
Dissertation by Yugon Kim
Translations by Yugon Kim
Papers by Yugon Kim
Berssenbrugge’s experimental lyric poem Endocrinology narrates and
responds to the environmental crisis by synthesizing science and
poetry. Part memoir, part scientific observation, Endocrinology vividly
describes the poet’s personal experience of environmental illness after
she was accidentally exposed to a toxic pesticide near her place.
Reading Endocrinology with Stacy Alaimo’s concept of
“trans-corporeality,” I argue that Berssenbrugge reconceptualizes the
body, especially women’s bodies affected by environmental illness, as
a trans-corporeal space in which the relationship between human and
nonhuman is entangled and affects each other. To illuminate various
aspects of environmental risks that permeate our daily lives,
Berssenbrugge not only critiques rigid categories between nature and
culture, but also seeks to broaden the scope of feminist literature
beyond human agency by highlighting the intersections of
environmental and gender issues. Navigating the boundaries between
the biomedical understanding of environmental risks and the sensory
perception of the toxic body, this essay finally suggests that
Berssenbrugge’s ecofeminist imagination helps readers to develop arts
of noticing in our moment of crisis.
to expand the Beat Generation’s counterculture poetics in the 1950s by
utilizing Japanese Buddhist philosopher D.T. Suzuki’s modern Zen
theory. For Whalen, Suzukian Zen, especially its emphasis on Zen as
everydayness and freedom, provided a critical aesthetic principle as he
tried to challenge the idea of cultural conformity largely mandated by
Cold War US ideologies. By closely reading his early Buddhist poems
such as “Harangue from Newport” (1957), “A Reflection on My Own
Times” (1959), and “NEFAS” (1966), I show the ways in which
Whalen enacted what Jack Kerouac calls “spiritual emancipation,” a
term that highlights the essence of the Beat spirit against US
nationalism and Cold War containment culture in the mid-twentieth
century. In doing so, I ultimately suggest that Whalen’s Buddhist
poetry creates an open space of dialogue and social criticism between
those who have engaged in American counterculture movement.
to offer online classes to help prevent the spread of the coronavirus. Online education
in the age of the pandemic can be best described what Charles Hodges calls
“Emergency Remote Teaching” (ERT), a term that suggests the paradigm shift of
instructional delivery during a crisis. This paper provides a case study that shows the
challenges of teaching English literature online in South Korea. The move to ERT
requires that instructors take more control of the course design and implementation
process, but at the same time, they have varying levels of digital fluency, especially
in the use of educational tools for distant learning. By sharing my experience of
teaching English literature course with emerging digital learning tools such as Zoom
Whiteboard, Slido, and Mindmeister, this paper highlights the importance of online
teaching pedagogies in order to promote student interaction in the virtual classroom
and manage effective collaborative learning. Ultimately, I suggest a “pedagogy of
care” for online literature education in South Korea, emphasizing that instructors
should be more attentive to students who have experienced various social, economic,
and emotional challenges in this uncertain time.