The sonic unconscious and the wartime radio novel in colonial Korea

Scholars such as Jonathan Sterne challenge contemporary literary and media analysis’ tendency to treat texts merely as inscribed and read by bringing renewed attention to sound not only as a narrative medium but also as an enduring “artifact of the messy and political human sphere.” In the same vein, I use this chapter to call attention to a pivotal moment in Korean history when literature, sound, and modern sound technology became inescapably intertwined under the force of Japanese total war mobilization in my analysis of an example of a sonic narrative, Kim Tongin’s radio novel “Nanjing Treaty” (1943).