Digital Humanities on Korean Literature: Revisiting Yŏm Sang-sŏp through Digital Literary Approaches

This talk aims to examine a body of works by Yŏm Sang-sŏp (1897-1963), a major fiction writer and critic in South Korea, through digital and quantitative analyses. Famous for his balancing of right- and left-wing ideologies and for his realistic writing style, packed with witty punchlines, Yŏm portrayed Korean society during and after the colonial period (1910-1945). Unlike many Korean writers who relocated to the North, voluntarily or otherwise, or who died during or shortly after the Korean War (1950-1953), Yŏm was an eyewitness to the emergence and development of Korean literature in the South. It is thus unfortunate that the existing literature has so far focused only on a small number of his canonical works. We have digitized as many of his fictional stories as possible and here examine them via quantitative and computational methods. In the first half of the talk, we will discuss the results of corpus analysis, including word frequency, co-occurrence, and text similarity, and attempt to link them to the narrative structure. In the second half, we will examine Yŏm’s sequential novels published after the Korean War through a network analysis of main characters. This analysis will demonstrate these characters’ various roles as links in an interconnected fictional universe. We hope that our presentation will reveal new possibilities for the application of digital approaches to authorial studies in Korean literature.