When the Future Disappears

Reviews / Votes

When the Future Disappears is an indispensable addition to the existing studies on Japanese modernism, Japanese imperialism and its politics and culture, European modernism, and the growing body of scholarly works on colonial Korea. -- Jin-Kyung Lee, University of California, San Diego 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 through the broader question of the complex temporality of the late colonial period and shows how culture bears the imprint of this sense of time in its very form. -- Alan Tansman, University of California, Berkeley 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. -- Harry Harootunian, Columbia 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. -- Jongyon Hwang, Dongguk University Elegantly written, well-researched... An excellent resource for anyone interested in Korean colonial history and literary studies and/or comparative and Asian literature. CHOICE This insightful and lucidly written monograph unpacks the contradictions of Korean modernity in the late colonial period. Korea Journal Janet Poole's fantastic book, When the Future Disappears: The Modernist Imagination in Late Colonial Korea, succeeds in doing what only the best writing can, stirring the heart and hackles of the empirically minded, as well as pushing the reader to access the vestiges of the intriguing group of artists' output that forms the centerpiece of the book. Sino NK The book's brilliance will without a doubt make it core reading for Koreanists. -- Keith Howard Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies A contemplative and immersive piece of scholarship... Poole's book is arresting and deeply thought-provoking... Her inclusion of Korean literature in the Japanese language revisits the perennial question of collaboration, and her ability to discuss these works sheds light in the darkest corners of the canon and begs a consideration of how literary histories of Korean may expand through a consideration of Korea's excised and excluded voices. -- Dafna Zur Pacific Affairs An important contribution to Korean literary studies. -- Karen L. Thornber Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies A fresh and invigorating approach to that unruly movement called modernism. Situations 9.2 A brilliant study of the works of six Korean writers produced in both Korean and Japanese during the last decade of colonial rule. -- Youngju Ryu Journal of Asian Studies