Modern Korean Digraphia: Metanarration and National Identity, 1894–1972

William Strnad traces the formation and development of modern Korean digraphia during the years 1894–1972, including a description and analysis of the historical discourse related to Korean phonetic script and Chinese characters.

Modern Korean digraphia was contextualized and altered amid the global emancipation and speculative metanarratives of modernity, and the national metanarratives of nationalism and modernization. These constructions were shaped by the civilization discourse of the nineteenth century, imperialism, the experience of Japanese occupation, and after liberation, the Cold War politics of Marxist utopianism in North Korea and bourgeois progressivism in South Korea. By 1972, the narrative closure of the global and national metanarratives of modernity in both Koreas provided the socio-political space for the limited reversal of Korean script exclusivity, which had earlier been implemented in the North and South.

About the author

Dr William Strnad received an MA in Korean Studies from Yonsei University (Seoul, Republic of Korea) in 2003 and a PhD in Korean Linguistics from Adam Mickiewicz University (Poznań, Poland) in 2021. He served in the field of human intelligence (HUMINT) for two decades, and since 2004 he has been a faculty member at Adam Mickiewicz University. He has taught subjects in the humanities and social sciences, including courses in modern Korean history, Chinese characters (for Korean), and Korean nationalism. He currently is a Senior Lecturer in the Korean Philology Department, Faculty of Ethnolinguistics, Adam Mickiewicz University. Dr Strnad has published articles in the following publications: Scripta Neophilologica Posnaniensia, Meandry Koreanistyki, Investigationes Linguisticae, Proceedings of the CEESOK International Conference on Korean Studies, and the International Journal of Korean Humanities and Social Sciences.

Source: publisher’s website