On October 22, 2024, the K-Future Team held a colloquium centered on “Korean Literature and Comparative Research: A Periphery without a Center, or the Possibility of Existing Absence,” a lecture by Bodurae Kwon, Professor of Korean Language and Literature at Korea University. Moderated by Professor Jeongha Kim of the Department of English Language and Literature at Seoul National University, the event revisited modern and contemporary Korean literature from the perspective of comparative research.

Building on her work tracing the origins of the “here and now” in modern and contemporary Korean literature and culture, Professor Kwon examined how Korean literature has taken shape through translated terms, world literature, the Cold War, and the movement of socialist literary models. The lecture approached translation not as the transmission of influence from center to periphery, but as a process in which words, concepts, institutions, and imaginaries move across contexts, reconfiguring the relations between original and translation, center and periphery, presence and absence.