Document Type

Article

Source

Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review

Publication Date

12-2013

Volume

1

Issue

9

First Page

146

Last Page

148

Abstract

As bibliographer D. F. McKenzie has suggested, the book is an expressive form. This means that “the fine details of typography and layout, the material signs which constitute a text” (McKenzie 1999, 25) signify. Therefore, the “human motives and interactions that texts involve at every stage of their production, transmission, and consumption” (McKenzie 1999, 15) are also implicitly part of what a text means. The objectives and relations McKenzie describes are those of authors, of course, but also those of the whole spectrum of people involved in a text’s creation and dissemination—what McKenzie has termed the sociology of a text. How the fine details of Korean literary artifacts may impact our appreciation of what they may mean has been all but ignored by scholars of modern Korean literature. Bibliographic descriptions of the artifacts of early twentieth-century literature and research detailing the people and technologies most directly involved in their physical production are almost entirely absent from discourses about twentieth-century Korean literature. Our understanding of this literature is acutely circumscribed by our ignorance of how its texts were made.

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