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This essay tracks the circulation and anticolonial reinvention of European modernist epiphanies in Korean modernist prose. The intertextuality of these epiphanies, the authors contend, enables Pak T'aewŏn, Yi Sang, and Yi Hyosŏk to disclose the fraudulence of Japanese cosmopolitanism and imperial modernization, while focalizing the possibilities and limitations of engaging Asian colonial modernity with European forms. In localizing the European epiphany, and ambivalently acknowledging Japanese versions of it, the Korean modernists generate significant irony to interrogate the impulse to wrest concentrated moments of insight, "bliss," or transcendence from the colonial everyday. Perhaps most disquieting is the realization that the exposure of imperialism's "fakeness" lacks the capacity to remedy the material, or literary, conditions of coloniality. Ultimately, Pak, Yi Sang, and Yi Hyosŏk deploy the epiphany to assert the need for a more reflective, neither Japanese nor European, vision; they remain deeply pessimistic, however, about the consummation of one within colonial modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If Japanese modernists, as Eric Hayot argues, conceived modernism and modernity as originating in the West, colonial Korean artists inevitably apprehended modernism from a double remove, through the mediation of Japanese literature and language. While they self‐consciously sought to develop a distinctive Korean modernist poetics (one not prefigured by Japanese modernism), the sense of belatedness remained inescapable among Korean modernist practitioners. With the 'expansionism' of the new modernist studies, as is well known, there has been substantial critical work to challenge and reject the belatedness and derivativeness attributed to 'peripheral' modernities and modernisms. However, to properly appreciate the singularity of Korean modernism, and its expressive efforts to place its colonial modernity in a global context, it is necessary to confront how these modernists understood, figured, and rearticulated their sense of belatedness. Taking a cue from Michaela Bronstein, I attend to the uses Korean modernists made of Western (and Japanese) modernisms and how these engagements enact the aesthetic and critical force of belatedness. Ultimately, I contend, Korean modernism's self‐reflexive, intertextual stagings of belatedness generate stylistic innovation, enabling writers to situate themselves within global modernism and disclose the fraudulence of colonial modernization and its imposition of second‐hand forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]