[Apr 24] How Reading Aloud Shaped the Literature of Chosŏn Korea: Sound and Literary Practice

Speaker: Prof. Si Nae Park | Harvard University | Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations

Date: April 24, 2026 (Fri)

Time: 4:00pm – 5:30pm

Venue: CRT-5.41, 5/F., Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

When we think of literature, we tend to imagine written texts. But did texts exist only in written form? This talk foregrounds the sound of reading—especially the practice of reading aloud revered texts—to argue that writing in Chosŏn Korea often existed as utterance. Reading aloud shaped not only the soundscape of literary culture but also spoken language and the very processes of literary creation. Drawing on diverse materials (state-endorsed printed books, manuscripts, traces on pages left by readers as book users, reports on scenes of reading, and paintings) from Chosŏn Korea, Park shows how attending to vocal reading allows us to discover fiction readers who preferred listening to their reading materials and literati who associated their recitation of the Confucian Classics with knowledge, moral cultivation, and physical well-being. Building on her earlier work that challenges Hangul-centered narratives of Korean literary history, Park demonstrates how, before the advent of sound recording and transmission, the sounded experience of texts structured the conditions of literacy, textual circulation, literary production, and creative imagination. In this context, vernacular reading emerges as a crucial technology of literary practice in Chosŏn Korea and a key to understanding the lived dynamics of Literary Sinitic as a shared classical written medium across East Asia for over two millennia. This sound-focused approach to literature raises the question of how to understand the conditions and infrastructure of literature beyond individual texts and writers within the broader context of the Sinographic Cosmopolis.

All are welcome. For enquiries, please contact Prof. Su Yun Kim at suyunkim@hku.hk