Sang-sup Lee

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Sang-sup Lee
이상섭 교수님.jpg 이상섭 교수님.jpg
Born	1937 Pyongyang, North Korea
💼 Occupation

Sang-sup Lee (Korean: 이상섭 [i-sang-sŏp]; Hanja: 李商燮; born 1937) is a South Korean scholar of English literature, a literary critic and theorist, a lexicographer, an educationalist, and a translator. He is professor emeritus in the English Language and Literature Department at Yonsei University and an authority on literature, who made a major contribution to establishing literary criticism as a systematic study of the humanities in South Korea. In particular, Lee translated Western literary-critical terminology into appropriate Korean words, reflecting the tone and nuance of each language. For example, he translated Viktor Shklovsky’s concept of “defamiliarization” into a pure Korean expression―"낯설게 하기" [nach'-sŏl-ke ha-ki] (“making it unfamiliar”)―without using Hanja (한자; 漢字) or Chinese characters, which were often used to translate foreign literary critical terms. Given that Hanja has been incorporated into the Korean language since the Gojoseon period (400 BCE) and is still routinely used in South Korea despite the creation of Hangeul (Korean alphabet; 1443), Lee’s rejection of its use in his translation contributed to reviving the authentic national language of Korea.

Lee has written and edited more than two dozen books on literary subjects, of which some representative ones are Methods of Literary Research: An Overview for Korean Application (문학연구의 방법: 그 한국적 적용을 위한 개관, 1972), Literary Criticism as Close Reading: Selected Critical Texts of Sang-sup Lee (자세히 읽기로서의 비평: 이상섭 평론집, 1988), History of British-American Criticism 1, 2, and 3 (영미 비평사 1,2,3, 1985⎼1996), and Discontents about History and Literature (역사에 대한 불만과 문학, 2002).

Lee also compiled Korean linguistic and historical corpus into several volumes of dictionaries, including the Yonsei Korean Dictionary (연세 한국어사전, 1998), the first Korean dictionary made digitally, and the Yonsei Dong-A Elementary Korean Dictionary (연세 동아 초등 국어사전, 2002), the Korean dictionary for elementary school students. This endeavor to lay the linguistic foundation of Korean humanities beyond English literature was crucial for some of Lee's award-winning career milestones, including the 1985 Achievement Award from the Korean Language Society, the 1988 Korean Literature Award from the Korean Culture and Arts Foundation, the 1999 Oesol Award from the Korean Association of Oesol, and the 2010 Order of Cultural Merit (보관문화훈장) from the Ministry of Culture in Korea.

Considering Lee's long-standing, deep interest in the language itself, Joon-hwan Kim, professor of English Literature at Yonsei University, regards one of Lee's autobiographical phrases―"I was tied to letters"―as an expression that encapsulates Lee's academic achievements. Indeed, Lee has referred to himself as “a scholar committed to the Korean alphabet” (“한글주의자” [han-kŭl-chu-ŭi-cha]), emphasizing his great interest in linguistic theories.

Since the 2000s, Lee has translated various pieces of world literature into Korean, including Aristotle's Poetics (Moonji Publishing, 2005) and William Shakespeare’s romance plays (Moonji Publishing, 2008). Lee also won the 2016 Yoo Yeong Translation Award for translating the Complete Works of Shakespeare for the first time in Korea (Moonji Publishing, 2016).

Life

Sang-sup Lee was born in 1937 in Pyongyang, Pyeongannam-do Province, now located in North Korea. His father, Hwan-shin Lee (이환신 [i-hwan-sin]; 李桓信; January 8, 1902 ⎼ June 21, 1984), was a pastor who graduated from Vanderbilt College of Theology and received a master’s degree in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania in the United States. After returning to Korea during the Japanese occupation, he opened a seminary in Pyongyang. Then, in the 1940s, the Japanese colonial government dismissed Methodist pastors in Pyongyang, including Lee’s father. As a result, the Lee family was expelled to Yeongbyeon, Pyeonganbuk-do Province. Later, Lee’s father pushed young Lee to drop out of his Japanese school, discovering that he was learning military songs and doing physical labor there. This decision made Lee become closer to nature instead, and he developed the ability to identify various insects and plants. Such ecological experiences helped Lee later when he was compiling dictionaries.

Following the emancipation of Korea in 1945, the family moved down to South Korea and Lee's father became a professor of sociology in Yonhee College (연희전문학교 [yŏn-hŭi-chŏn-mun-hak-kyo]; 延禧專門學校), Seoul. Lee went to middle and high school across the Korean War (1950⎼53), and in 1956, Lee entered the undergraduate program of Yonsei University's Department of English Language and Literature. In a recent interview, Lee recalled that Professor Choi Jae-seo's courses, such as “Theory of Literature,” were the best among the undergraduate classes at that time, but also pointed out that Choi's writings had increasingly become pro-Japanese since the late 1930s until the Korean emancipation of 1945.

In 1960, Lee enrolled in the master's course at the graduate school of Yonsei University. His thesis was "A Study on Alexander Pope's Poetry" (Alexander Pope의 詩 硏究, 1961). Upon completing his master's degree in 1962, Lee became a faculty member at Yonsei University, but the dean strongly advised him to study for a doctoral degree in the United States. Therefore, in 1964, Lee entered the Ph. D. program of Emory University, specializing in Renaissance literature, and finished his doctoral dissertation in three years, titled "A Study in the Varieties of Literary Opinion in the Elizabethan Age." Lee’s dissertation encompassed theories about the nature of poetry, Elizabethan reactions to the problem of the use and abuse of poetry, and Elizabethan ideas concerning style and poetic rules.

Beginning in 1967, Lee worked as an assistant professor at Murray State University for one year. In 1968, Lee returned to Yonsei University as an associate professor and was promoted to a full professor in 1971. In 1979, Lee became the chair of the Department of English Language and Literature and later served as the dean of the College of Liberal Arts from August 1993 to July 1995. In the meantime, he was a research fellow at Harvard University from September 1976 to June 1977, a visiting scholar at Virginia University from September 1984 to February 1985, and also a visiting scholar at UCLA from September 1999 to February 2000. In 2002, Lee retired as a professor emeritus at Yonsei University.

Furthermore, Lee served diverse positions within Yonsei University as below:

• 1968.9⎼76.7 Head of Language Education Major in the Graduate School of Education
• 1969.3⎼73.2 Head of Education Division in the Graduate School of Education
• 1973.3⎼74.12 Head of Education Division in the Graduate School
• 1987.9⎼89.8 Director of Humanities Research Institute
• 1989.6⎼93.7 Director of the Lexicographical Center for the Korean Language
• 1995.9⎼02.2 Director of the Lexicographical Center for the Korean Language

Other off-campus academic activities are as follows (all within South Korea):

• 1962⎼ongoing Member of the English Language and Literature Association of Korea
• 1967⎼ongoing Member of the Modern Language Association of America
• 1992.10⎼97.5 President of the Criticism and Theory Society of Korea
• 1997.5 ⎼ 99.5 President of the English Language and Literature Association of Korea
• 1995.9 ⎼ 97.9 Chair of the Overseas Regional Research Evaluation Committee (appointed by the Minister of Education of South Korea)
• 1995.5 ⎼ 97.5 Member of Korean Language Deliberation Commission appointed by the Minister of Culture and Public Information of South Korea)
• 1997.3 ⎼ 99.2 Chair of the Early-Childhood English Education Advisory Committee (appointed by the Minister of Education of South Korea)
• 1997.4 ⎼ 99.4 Director of the Translation Foundation of Korea (appointed by the Minister of Culture of South Korea)
• 1998.1 ⎼ 99.1 Vice President of the Korean Association of Academic Societies
• 1999⎼ongoing Invited Member of the International Association of University Professors of English
• 1999.7 ⎼ 01.8 President of the Asian Association of Lexicography

Work

Korean Meta-Criticism

In the 1970s, Sang-sup Lee aimed to develop literary criticism in South Korea into an organized humanities field of study with a specific "academic skeleton" (“학술적 뼈대” [hak-sul-chŏk ppyŏ-tae]) or precise methodology and quantifiable analysis. At the same time, he regarded academic work as a process of expanding, converting, and forming interrelationships of phraseology. Thus, he compiled contemporary Western critical terms for Korean scholars in A Glossary of Literary Criticism (문학비평용어사전, 1976). In this book, Lee added his own critical and theoretical reinterpretation for each term, considering the local standpoint of the far East Asian literary culture. For instance, when he explains “rhyme,” he mentions the rhymes of Korean and Chinese poetry along with Western examples. Besides, he produced a natural yet legitimate Korean translation of each term, with numerous examples from Korean literature.

Holding a global perspective that decentralizes Western literature, other early works of Lee formulate a kind of “meta-criticism” that compares, contrasts, and synthesizes different methodologies. For instance, in his Methods of Literary Research: An Overview for Korean Application (1972), Lee juxtaposes diverse critical approaches, categorizing them into historicism, formalism, sociology, ethicism, psychologism, and mythological criticism; and objects of literary analysis as mimesis, reader-response, expression, and structure. In particular, Lee saw the latter classification regarding literature as a “trans-historical” standard, asserting “the immutability of the system” in Historical Development of Literary Theory (문학이론의 역사적 전개, 1975).

In the mid-1980s through to the 1990s, Lee’s equitable interest in various critical voices across the eras came to fruition via History of British-American Criticism 1, 2, and 3 (영미비평사 1,2,3). In this series, Lee divided the discourses of literary criticism into three parts: Renaissance and Neoclassicism (1530⎼1800), British romanticism and Victorian aestheticism (1800⎼1900), and New Criticism. Overall, this diachronic trilogy overall provides a comprehensive overview of the history of critical theories in the British-American literary world. Furthermore, Lee repeatedly emphasizes in their prefaces that English literature study in South Korea should autonomously develop as a "South Korean" discipline that “South Koreans teach to South Koreans in the Korean language." This local awareness repeatedly echoes within the series, such as when it intentionally omits the texts that were impossible to buy in South Korea at the time of publication.

New Critical Education

In the 1980s, Sang-sup Lee introduced a New Critical teaching method in South Korean academia. This approach closely reads the literary content rather than paying much attention to its socio-historical contexts. As part of its practice, Lee made undergraduate students of Yonsei University study the latest editions of The Norton Anthology of English Literature from 1981, encouraging them to read literary canons comprehensively yet intensively. This pedagogical style seems to have been influenced by his former career as an assistant professor at Murray State University in the 1960s. At that time, he mainly taught the course "Introduction to Literature,” using An Approach to Literature (1952) as his textbook. In a 2012 interview, Lee recalled that he had found this work’s text-centric questions were genuinely effective in understanding literature and determined to bring it into South Korea.

Additionally, Lee’s acquaintance with New Criticism influenced his critical works of the 1980s, such as History of British-American Criticism 3: New Criticism Study, the Poetics of Complexity (영미 비평사 3: 복합성의 시학, 뉴크리티시즘 연구, 1987) and Literary Criticism as Close Reading: Selected Critical Texts of Sang-sup Lee (1988). Lee adopted the methodology of New Criticism because it focuses on the author's authentic voice, rather than judging it according to other historical, political, or theoretical agendas. Thus, in the latter book about close reading, Lee dedicates one chapter to reader-response theory but also deals with the comparative standpoint between the literature of East and West and the Korean literary tradition. In this way, Lee always has highlighted that literature should come prior to critical theory, pointing out that named literary theorists, including Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida, also originally received inspiration from literature. In the same vein, Lee has highlighted the purpose of critical theory as “finding the distinct voice of each literary work,” not excluding certain epochs or trends. Such perspectives further led him to criticize historical criticism or literary historicism.

In this way, Lee has been wary of offsetting the enjoyment of literature by evaluating it authoritatively and arbitrarily outside the text. Nevertheless, Lee does not want to be called a New Critic, and it would be inappropriate because he has been more interested in the methodology of close reading as a tool for educating literature or a genuinely immersive experience to understand literature, rather than agreeing with the New Critics’ politico-philosophical viewpoints. Therefore, strictly speaking, Lee is not a New Critic but a New Critical educationalist.

Korean Corpus Analysis

From the mid-1980s through to the early 2000s, Sang-sup Lee’s pursuit of founding a localized K-English literature study (English literature study as a "South Korean" discipline) reached into Korean literature. Specifically, Lee reevaluated two Korean poets, Yun Dong-ju (윤동주 [yun-tong-chu]; 尹東柱; December 30, 1917 – February 16, 1945) and Han Yong-un (한용운 [han-yong-un]; 韓龍雲; August 29, 1879 – June 29, 1944), by organizing their rhetorics in the form of concordance. This text-based approach revealed how often the writers wrote a specific word in a particular context and what significant meaning those specific words produced in tandem. For example, Lee recognized for the first time that Han separately used the two similar Korean words, “기룹다” [ki-lup-ta] (“miss”; “respectable”; “praiseworthy”) and “그립다” [kŭ-lip-ta] (“miss”; “long for”) in different parts of “The Silence of My Love” (님의 沈默, 1926), one of Han’s representative poetries. According to Lee, “기룹다” does not only refer to the feeling of longing, but also bears a subtle hint of “admiration.” However, before Lee analyzes Han’s works using such a bibliographical approach, many South Korean editors arbitrarily revised Han’s “기룹다” into “그립다,” a more familiar but slightly different Korean word. This corpus-driven research of Lee was not independent of his New Critical tendency to emphasize the importance of close reading.

Meanwhile, Lee collected the Korean corpus as director of the Lexicographical Center for the Korean Language at Yonsei University in the late 1980s through to the early 2000s. At that time, although decades had passed since emancipation, the history of Japanese colonization lingered in the everyday language of the South Korean people. Thus, Lee ventured to facilitate the authentic Korean language culture by compiling Korean dictionaries, including Lexicography Studies (사전편찬학연구, 1988⎼2001), the Yonsei Korean Dictionary (1998), and the Yonsei Dong-A Elementary Korean Dictionary (2002). In the process, Lee first used the computational method and also first translated the English word “corpus” into a pure Korean compound word “말뭉치” ([mal-mung-ch'i]; “a bundle of the word”). Lee later interestingly acknowledged that these lexicographical works were inspired by Samuel Johnson, who compiled A Dictionary of the English Language (1755) in the Neoclassical era.

Such interest in the South Korean humanities has led Lee to translate English literature of various writers from Thomas Malory to Shakespeare into the Korean language. In particular, Lee has focused on correcting mistranslations under the influence of Japanese occupation. For instance, Koreans have long recited the most famous line in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, “To be, or not to be,” as “죽느냐 사느냐” [chuk-nŭ-nya sa-nŭ-nya] ("To live or to die"), following the Japanese translation. However, Lee points out it should be translated as “존재냐 부재냐” [chon-chae-nya pu-chae-nya] (“To subsist, or not to exist and disappear”) instead, because it is a line of Prince Hamlet, who studied philosophy at Wittenberg University. In addition, Lee’s translation is famous for its delicately composed musicality, adjusted to the pitches of the Korean language while preserving the rhymes of English. One example is his 2016 translation of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. This problem play had been introduced to Koreans under the Japanese title, “이척보척” [i-ch'ŏk-po-ch'ŏk] (以尺報尺), whose meaning is difficult for most Koreans to understand, and which has a different rhyme from the original, and does not convey the biblical connotation. Hence, Lee translated it as “눈은 눈으로, 이는 이로” [nun-ŭn nun-ŭ-lo, i-nŭn i-lo] (“An Eye for an Eye; a Tooth for a Tooth") to preserve the rhythmic nuance of Shakespeare’s words while using the familiar Korean language. In his most recent interview in 2017, Lee said he wants to be remembered as a translator of Shakespeare above anything else.

Criticism

During his early and mid-term career as a scholar, Sang-sup Lee rearranged Western critical theories in a meticulous and objective way. However, his rare sense of balance, which neither praises nor disparages a specific theory, ironically became the target of criticism. For example, Gyung-ryul Jang, professor emeritus in the English Language and Literature Department at Seoul National University, pointed out that Lee’s History of British-American Criticism 1, 2, and 3 failed to reveal his independent perspective sufficiently while excessively avoiding the risk of "arbitrary generalization” (“자의적 일반화” [cha-ŭi-chŏk il-pan-hwa]).

Major Publications

Authored Books

• Understanding Literature (문학의 이해, 1972)
• Methods of Literary Research (문학연구의 방법, 1972)
• A History of Literary Theory (문학이론의 역사적 전개, 1975)
• The Order of Words (말의 질서, 1976)
• A Glossary of Literary Criticism (문학비평용어사전, 1976.)
• Language and Imagination: Literature Theory and Practical Criticism (언어와 상상: 문학이론과 실제비평, 1980)
• Vocabulary Structure of “The Silence of My Love” (“님의 침묵”의 어휘와 그 활용 구조, 1984)
• History of British-American Criticism 1: The Renaissance and Neoclassical Criticism 1530⎼1800 (영미 비평사 1: 르네상스와 신고전주의 비평 1530~1800, 1985)
• Educational theory of College Literature (대학문학 교육론, 1985)
• History of British-American Criticism 3: New Criticism Study, the Poetics of Complexity (영미 비평사 3: 복합성의 시학, 뉴크리티시즘 연구, 1987)
• Literary Criticism as Close Reading: Selected Critical Texts of Sang-sup Lee (자세히 읽기로서의 비평: 이상섭 평론집, 1988)
• History of British-American Criticism 2: From Romanticism to Aestheticism 1800⎼1900 (영미 비평사 2: 낭만주의에서 심미주의까지 1800~1900, 1996)
• Selected Anti-Essays of Sang-sup Lee (이상섭 안티에세이 모음, 2000)
• Literature, History, and Society (문학·역사·사회, 2001)
• A Study of Aristotle's Poetics (아리스토텔레스의 <시학> 연구, 2002)
• Discontents about History and Literature (역사에 대한 불만과 문학, 2002)
• A Close Reading of Yun Dong-ju (윤동주 자세히 읽기, 2007)

Edited Books

• Selected English Critical Texts with Excerpts from Classical Criticism (1982)
• Lexicography Studies (사전편찬학연구, 1988⎼2001)
• Yonsei Korean Dictionary (연세 한국어사전, 1998)
• Yonsei Dong-A Elementary Korean Dictionary (연세 동아 초등 국어사전, 2002)

Translations

• Brewster Ghiselin, The Creative Process: A Symposium (예술 창조의 과정, 1964)
• Dylan Thomas, Poem in October: Selected Poems of Dylan Thomas (시월의 시: 딜런 토머스 시 선집, 1975)
• Alfred Lord Tennyson, Lyrical Ballads (서정시집, 1975)
• Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quijote de La Mancha (동 끼호테, 1984)
• Wilfred Owen, Complete Works of Owen (오웬 전집, 1987)
• William Shakespeare, Sonnets of Shakespeare (셰익스피어, 1988; 소네트집, 2001)
• Aristotle. Poetics (시학, 2005)
• William Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s Romance Plays (셰익스피어 로맨스 희곡 전집, 2008)
• William Shakespeare, Complete Works of Shakespeare (셰익스피어 전집, 2016)

See Also

New Criticism / Close reading / Reader-response theory / Corpus Linguistics

References

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