Korean Sijo and Kasa as Boundary Objects
Wayne de Fremery · A Companion to World Literature · 2019
Sijo and kasa are Korean musical genres also orchestrated in poetic literary modes on paper and, more recently, computer monitors, suggesting diverse material configurations and bodily practices. Time and space – organized by the performing body and the materials of literary expression – are keys to understanding these configurations. We might say that sijo index spatial and temporal experience while kasa describe it. This chapter proposes that we can think of sijo and kasa as boundary objects, a term borrowed from science and technology studies. Flexible, structurally similar, and residing between diverse communities, sijo and kasa suggest the ways that diverse material configurations and bodily practices have been orchestrated through time, as well as some of the boundaries they share with world literature as an object of study.