Join the GW Institute for Korean Studies for our next installment of our Premodern Lecture Series, featuring Dennis Wuerthner from Boston University. Professor Wuerthner will present on the topic, "Kǔmo Sinhwa as Anti-Yiduan Propaganda-Fiction".

Against the backdrop of different texts from the collected writings of Sǒljam Kim Sisǔp, in this talk I will offer an against-the-grain reading of Kim’s famous collection of strange tales Kǔmo sinhwa (New Tales of the Golden Turtle). I argue that Kim’s life as well as his fictional and non-fictional literature should be viewed in the tradition of earlier Chinese and Korean anti-Buddhist Neo-Confucian thinkers. By discussing such issues as funerary rites, “unhappy” Confucians, or the persuasive power of storytelling, I hypothesize that Kǔmo sinhwa may be read as a piece of narrative anti-religious propaganda-fiction designed to thwart a revival of Buddhism on the state level in the 1460s.