NONSENSE AS SENSIBILITY: Te Importance of Not Being Earnest in Colonial Korea and Taiwan

What is nonsense literature, and why was it practiced in colonial Korea? In European literature, literary nonsense took on its most famous material form with Lewis Carroll’s Alice books and saw a resurgence among modernists in the 1920s and 1930s. At the same time, nonsense appeared on the horizon of Japanese mass culture in the form of a trend called “ero-guro-nansensu.” In Korea, too, nonsense became a popular neologism, but it particularly became associated with the social absurdity of young intellectuals on the margins of colonial capitalist society.This chapter puts Korean authors and print culture from the 1930s in dialogue with Taiwanese writers of the same time to argue for a colonial nonsense literature, which negotiated the troubled waters between assimilationist cosmopolitanism and anti-colonial defiance. Using well-known and lesser known works by Yi Sang, Ch’ae Mansik, and Pak T’aewŏn, and embedding readings of their work within the print culture of the period, I demonstrate that they not only were aware of nonsense literature in a global context but brought their own colonial positionality to their practice of modernist nonsense. A more antiquarian view of nonsense from Taiwan, where literary nonsense took the form of profanity-ridden traditional poetry and absurd references to classical texts, suggests that colonial nonsense did not necessarily belong to the modern or the classical. Instead, it was characterized by its ability to offer a space of abstract noncompliance and disobedience in an era where the colonial regime was closing down on spaces of expression.