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This insightful and lucidly written monograph unpacks the contradictions of Korean modernity in the late colonial period. Elegantly written, well-researched... An excellent resource for anyone interested in Korean colonial history and literary studies and/or comparative and Asian literature. Jongyon Hwang, Dongguk University:No other English-language academic study of Korean literature more elegantly combines close readings of selected texts with salient readings of their historical and cultural contexts. When the Future Disappears marvelously reanimates aesthetic constellations that emerged at the intersection of colonialism, fascism, and modernism. Harry Harootunian, Columbia University:Poole's brilliantly executed reading of late colonial Korean modernism and fascism exceeds the constraints of mere exceptionality and locality to instantiate colonial Korea's entry into a global modernity that everywhere inflected the encounter with capitalism's production of temporal unevenness through ceaseless efforts to use the past to reinforce a present driven by the pursuit of the new. Poole's decision to see the colonial experience through the prism of the modernist imaginary makes her book a singularly original and valuable contribution to both our understanding of Korea and the wider world of imperial violence. Alan Tansman, University of California, Berkeley:In this world-class piece of scholarship and conceptual thinking, Poole shows how Korean poets, philosophers, and essayists in the colonial period struggled in their work with the notion of a disappearing future with no change in sight. Through the local Korean case, she works throu Taking a panoramic view of Korea's dynamic literary production in the final decade of Japanese rule, When the Future Disappears locates the imprint of a new temporal sense in Korean modernism: the impression of time interrupted, with no promise of a future. As colonial subjects of an empire headed toward total war, Korean writers in this global fascist moment produced some of the most sophisticated writings of twentieth-century modernism.Yi T'aejun, Ch'oe Myongik, Im Hwa, So Insik, Ch'oe Chaeso, Pak T'aewon, Kim Namch'on, and O Changhwan, among other Korean writers, lived through a rare colonial history in which their vernacular language was first inducted into the modern, only to be shut out again through the violence of state power. The colonial suppression of Korean-language publications was an effort to mobilize toward war, and it forced Korean writers to face the loss of their letters and devise new, creative forms of expression. Their remarkable struggle reflects the stark foreclosure at the heart of the modern colonial experience. Straddling cultural, intellectual, and literary history, this book maps the different strategies, including abstraction, irony, paradox, and even silence, that Korean writers used to narrate life within the Japanese empire
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