Hybrid PESGB Seminar Series ‘Labouring over Words: Exploring the intrinsic educational significance and pedagogical practice of reading and writing’ Dr Soyoung Lee (Pusan National University)

Organised by Dr Aline Nardo (University of Edinburgh) and Dr Shari Sabeti (University of Edinburgh); co-sponsored by the Arts and Humanities in Education Research Group (AHERG) at the University of Edinburgh

When reading becomes listening

Kim Soom’s novel Listening Time describes an encounter between an interviewer and an elderly former “comfort woman”. She is to give testimony to her experience. Yet, even as the tape runs to its end, there seems to be nothing worth recording as “words.” The interviewer nevertheless remains, attending closely to her silence. No explanation is offered. The novel structurally resists full comprehension, and yet it draws readers in. This structure, with negativity built in, is to be seen as inherent also in the giving of testimony itself: words are never transparent, words fail, they run out. What pervades the novel is the sense of separation, even of impossibility. Here the experience of reading itself comes close to an attentive listening—that is, listening to the silence. What is illustrated is, I suggest, a kind of ethical sensibility that literature can train us in—in which ethics is understood as an attitude towards the other, not grounded in cognitive comprehension or emotional identification (as ‘empathy’ is often understood), but in the acknowledgement of human separation, the impossibility of our being one. I suggest, drawing on philosophers such as Derrida and Levinas, that acknowledging such negativity within our lives is nothing less than ethics, and of much importance in education.

Soyoung Lee is an Associate Professor of Philosophy of Education at Pusan National University, South Korea. Her research explores phenomenology, ethics, and post-structuralist philosophy, with a particular interest in what literature and film can do in education. She is the author of Poetics of Alterity: Education, Art, Politics (Wiley, 2021). Her work has been published in journals in both English and Korean, including the Journal of Philosophy of Education and Educational Theory. Her recent publications include “Hitting Bedrock: From Multiculturalism to Political Education and Self-Knowledge”, “Covering the Wound: Education and the Work of Mourning”.

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