Friday, April 18 2025, 2 - 3:30pm on ZOOM Jooyeon Rhee, Associate Professor of Asian Studies and Comparative Literature, Penn State University Drawing from the figure of flȃneur in European modernist fiction, this talk focuses on the Korean writer Yŏm Sangsŏp’s novel On the Eve of the Uprising (1922-1924) by considering the protagonist as a colonial flȃneur—an educated male stroller in a colonial situation. The disempowered colonial flȃneur’s detailed and sensorial descriptions of urban spaces, people, infrastructure, sound, noise, smell, etc. become a transgressive tool to identify and challenge the everyday violence of imperial power and to delineate the multiplicity of colonial subjectivity at the intersections of gender and race. This talk will bring in one of the earliest flȃneur figures from Edgar Allan Poe’s “Man of the Crowd” and the Japanese detective fiction writer Edogawa Rampo’s “The Stalker in the Attic” into conversation with Yŏm’s novel to show how the figure, who is at once a fugitive and a detective, renders the imbrication of colonial modernity through archiving the everyday. Register Here: https://zoom.us/meeting/register/woktl0kTR1SGkPXRz9uovg#/registration
