{"title":"English and Neoliberalism in South Korea","authors":"Joseph Sung-Yul Park","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190855734.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190855734.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter provides an in-depth picture of the book’s ethnographic context, presenting a historical account of neoliberalism in South Korea and the role the English fever played within it. Through its review of Korea’s neoliberalization process that began in the 1990s, the chapter focuses on several actors that were critical in this process, including the United States, major Korean conglomerates known as jaebeol, and the state. The chapter then reviews key phenomena that constituted the Korean English fever, clarifying why they should be seen as a manifestation of neoliberalism. Finally, the chapter explains how a range of intense feelings and affects pervaded Koreans’ experience of English throughout the country’s modern history, using it to argue that aspects of subjectivity that characterize the Korean English fever should be understood in terms of the specific historical and political economic conditions of Korean society, rather than a Korean cultural essence.","PeriodicalId":282431,"journal":{"name":"In Pursuit of English","volume":"75 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126190701","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Becoming Precarious Subjects","authors":"Joseph Sung-Yul Park","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190855734.003.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190855734.003.0008","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter considers the consequences of the subjectivities of English explored in the previous chapters, exploring how they contribute to the condition of extreme precarity of contemporary Korean society. Through Korea’s neoliberal transformation, work and life has grown significantly insecure. In particular, unemployment of the younger generation has reached a historical high, and fear of failure leads this generation to continuously invest in accumulation of marketable skills and to forgo life itself so that they may survive in the fierce competition in the job market. Through an analysis of how criteria for good English in the white-collar job market have been constantly raised and renewed over the decades since the 1990s, this chapter argues that subjectivities of English promoted in neoliberalism may groom workers to be precarious subjects by aligning their hopes and expectations about life and labor with the insecure and uncertain conditions of work under the neoliberal economy.","PeriodicalId":282431,"journal":{"name":"In Pursuit of English","volume":"39 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125545475","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Language and Subjectivity in Neoliberalism","authors":"Joseph Sung-Yul Park","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190855734.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190855734.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter establishes the theoretical and conceptual basis for the book by first defining neoliberalism, reviewing the various challenges that have emerged in addressing the complex and multifaceted nature of neoliberalism. It then provides an overview of the theoretical frameworks for understanding neoliberalism and how they might be adopted for the study of language and subjectivity. It contrasts Marxist and Foucauldian approaches to neoliberalism, proposing a synthesis in which Foucault’s insights are used to clarify how the neoliberal shaping of subjectivities works to obscure class-based inequalities and to rationalize increasing precarity of life under intensifying capitalism and the global economy. Finally, the chapter considers how such processes of subjectivity might be traced through theoretical and analytic constructs from sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, especially through the analysis of metapragmatic discourse.","PeriodicalId":282431,"journal":{"name":"In Pursuit of English","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128870798","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Language Learning as Technology of the Self","authors":"Joseph Sung-Yul Park","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190855734.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190855734.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter explores how the act of English language learning came to be framed as a moral project during the Korean English fever, focusing on the role that such aspects of morality played in rationalizing the social inequalities reproduced and exacerbated through the neoliberal promotion of English. Its analysis focuses on representation of successful learners of English in the conservative press, which frequently published stories of elite English language learners throughout the English fever. The chapter shows how these stories consistently downplayed the privileged provenance of the successful learners, and instead highlighted the extraordinary effort they put into learning English, presenting them as moral figures—ideal neoliberal subjects who immerse themselves in careful and ethical management of oneself. It is through such representations that English language learning came to reframed as a Foucauldian technology of the self, and a moral responsibility for neoliberal self-development.","PeriodicalId":282431,"journal":{"name":"In Pursuit of English","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128735607","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Biopolitics of Language Learning","authors":"Joseph Sung-Yul Park","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190855734.003.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190855734.003.0006","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter critically examines modes of English language learning that capitalize on the linguistic malleability of youth, collectively known as early English education (yeongeo jogi gyoyuk), arguing that the embodied nature of language learning makes such investments an important site for the inculcation of neoliberal subjectivities. A prominent aspect of the Korean English fever was the emphasis placed on exposing youths to English at an increasingly earlier age. Focusing on the case of early study abroad (jogi yuhak), this chapter argues that these aged-based projects of English language learning are not simply outcomes of increasing competition that drives down the age for first exposure to English; instead, they are facilitated by a deep sense of anxiety that derives from viewing youth as a limited resource, and in this sense, they are a site of biopolitics, where bodies of youth come to be incorporated into the logic of neoliberalism.","PeriodicalId":282431,"journal":{"name":"In Pursuit of English","volume":"130 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134010907","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Conclusions","authors":"Joseph Sung-Yul Park","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190855734.003.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190855734.003.0009","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter closes this book by summarizing the arguments made in the previous chapters and considering the implications for the study of language and political economy. Subjectivities of English in neoliberalism jointly work to present neoliberal subjecthood as the ideal way of living, thereby rationalizing the structures of control inherent in neoliberalism. Research on language and political economy has much to gain by attending to aspects of subjectivity that underlie the way language gets incorporated into the conditions of the changing economy, as language serves as an important channel through which neoliberalism extends its control over our minds, bodies, and sense of being. For this, we need to recognize that subjective experiences of being a language user is fraught with tensions based on material relations, and make them a serious focus for the study of language and political economy.","PeriodicalId":282431,"journal":{"name":"In Pursuit of English","volume":"35 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115554831","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Language as Pure Potential","authors":"Joseph Sung-Yul Park","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190855734.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190855734.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter outlines how a desire for English provides a particular articulation to neoliberal ideologies of language, serving as a foundation for the Korean English fever. Considering desire not as a primal urge that naturally emerges from our inner psyche but as a socially constituted force, this chapter considers how English was conceptualized as an object of desire through the English fever, and what implications this had for Koreans’ affective positioning in relation to English. It explains how the ideology of language as pure potential—a view of language as a completely neutral tool for conveying messages in an unadulterated way, a pure medium of potentiality that enables a speaker to achieve anything she wishes to—facilitates this process, allowing the desire for English to be mobilized for the neoliberal logic of human capital development in the context of globalization.","PeriodicalId":282431,"journal":{"name":"In Pursuit of English","volume":"43 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128071373","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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