The Pitfalls of Literary Globalization: Korea’s Self Othering in Ahn Junghyo’s Silver Stallion: A Novel of Korea

Abstract

This paper critically examines the problems of literary globalization in the novel of Ahn Junghyo, a prestigious translator and well-known novelist of Korea. As the repeating slogan “The most Korean is the most global!” implies, the project of globalizing Korean Literature has insisted on promoting the national for the global recognition. An odd mixture of cultural nationalism and obsessive globalism that underlies the slogan, however, holds the author split between two demands of having to represent what is most Korean and, at the same time, to be incorporated with the global order. Those two seemingly incompatible demands go hand in hand with each other in Ahn’s Silver Stallion: A Novel of Korea, a novel of the Korean War originally intended for American readers and written in both Korean and English, yet at the expense of objectifying Korea as an oriental Other for the West. It is revealed through an analysis of the differences between Korean and English texts. Ahn’s cultural translation tends to rely on stereotypes and exoticism and, more seriously, repeats sexualizing the national for the Western eyes. In this sense Ahn’s novel shows an example of self-orientalization that literary globalization might fall into.