Teaching comes so naturally to Hyungji Park, assistant professor of
English, that she cannot remember when she taught her first class.
All she remembers is lecturing passionately, filling the chalkboard with notes in an
empty college classroom at her father's university. She was a high school student on
summer break, giving a lesson on photosynthesis to a hypothetical group of students.
A few things have changed since then — for one thing, her subject now is Victorian
literature rather than biology — but the enthusiasm and desire to share her excitement
with students remain.
Park began her undergraduate years at Harvard planning to become a research scientist.
Working in the immunology lab of a Nobel laureate one summer, she was avidly reading Don
Quixote while waiting for her experimental slides to develop.
“My timer for the slides would go off every fifteen minutes, and I would have to
apply a new solution to the slides,” she says. “But even with those
interruptions, the novel was a great read. Then I noticed that no one else was
reading.” Realizing that her passion for reading might signal that biology was not
the best match for her interests, she changed her major to English and graduated with high
honors.
Now in her third year at Union, Park teaches British literature, specializing in the
Victorian period, a specialty that she chose in much the same way she chose English as a
career — by giving in to her instincts.
“When I was in high school, some of my favorite books were Jane Eyre, Wuthering
Heights, and Pride and Prejudice,” she says. “I read them over and
over; they were my equivalent of coming-of-age teen novels. Later, I never thought that I
could become a Victorianist because those novels were too much embedded in me; they had
helped constitute my identity, and I wasn't sure I could deal with them critically, as a
scholar should. I'm still struggling with that, but I think the personal dimension
enriches my scholarly approach.”
After graduating from Harvard, Park spent a year teaching English at Concord Academy, a
private boarding school in Concord, Mass. Over her spring break in London, she found
herself at the British Museum reading every word of every description about the displays.
That was when she knew for certain that she wanted the life of a scholar — focusing not
only on teaching but also on research.
“One reason college-level teaching is so rewarding is because you are also
expected to pursue an active research agenda,” she says. “In the British Museum
that day, I was thirsty for knowledge because I had been teaching for six months — giving
and giving of myself — without taking in anything. As a professor, I am learning and
absorbing and processing new material all the time so that in the classroom I am not
speaking from a position of fixed authority but rather asking students to participate in
the investigation of a topic with me.”
One way she does this, she says, is by going into her classes with questions instead of
answers. “I don't think that there is just one answer for many of the questions we
raise,” she says. “There are many answers. In class, I make some speculations
and offer some possibilities and then see if the students take it further. The chance of
learning as much from my students as they learn from me is one of the things I like best
about teaching.”
Park's research interests and course offerings are centered on Victorianism, but are
founded in history as well as literary criticism. As a graduate student, Park says that
she became intrigued with the effects of empire upon male characters in Victorian novels.
Her curiosity developed into a doctoral dissertation at Princeton that examined the
importance of empire in shaping British masculinity in the nineteenth century.
“In the Victorian novel, there are numerous male characters who go away somewhere,
usually to India or Asia, for a period of time and return without any explanation of how
this experience affected them,” she explains. Few of the male characters who returned
from abroad bragged about their experiences; most, in fact, didn't talk about their
experiences at all, choosing to become upright, respected Englishmen who meld into
society.
“English masculinity is dependent upon having an empire, yet successful Englishmen
do not engage directly with their experiences in the colonies at all,” she says.
Just as Park's dissertation evolved from a natural curiosity, the range of her courses
at Union reflects the range of her interests.
Her early Victorian literature course last fall explored issues of class mobility,
industrialization, professions for women, working class conditions, and empire and
nationalism. She included often-overlooked books such as Aurora Leigh by Elizabeth
Barrett Browning and Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte because they offered
important commentaries on the lives of women in the nineteenth century.
“What made the class really exciting, though, was that we had very active
discussions,” Park says. “The students made interesting connections that I
hadn't seen before.”
This winter, Park taught nineteenth century novel and film, a course that resulted from
her observation of recent film adaptations of Victorian novels. “I began to ask
myself, 'Why is it that in the 1990s we have this particular obsession with turning
nineteenth-century British novels into films?' “
To answer the question, her course examined older film versions of the novels as well
as new ones.
“We explored the relationship between time period and medium by looking at two
historical periods and two forms of cultural products — the novel and film, which in many
ways occupy the same position, as forms of popular entertainment, relative to their time
period,” she says.
The initial question that prompted the course about why film adaptations are recently
so common has many answers, she says — the films offer a sense of security (with tidy,
happy-ending plots) combined with escapist pleasure (the difference between our own world
and Victorian society in everything from clothing to manners to social expectations).
This spring, Park's course on Victorian detective fiction explores why this particular
genre developed at the same time as the rise of the British Empire.
“Detective fiction actually has a very conservative thrust,” Park explains.
“While we popularly think of detective fiction as about the adventurous and the new,
it is actually about maintaining the status quo. What is so satisfying about detective
fiction is that you start out with a certain situation which gets overturned, but by the
end is restored.”
Park says the simultaneous rise of detective fiction and the rise of the British Empire
reinforced British interests and provided reassurance in a changing world. “In the
Victorian age, when Britain was in contact with so many foreign cultures, there was a fear
that foreigners might somehow affect domestic society. The detective's job was to make
sure that didn't happen and to protect England.”
Park continues to follow her instincts and interests into new paths. Last year, she
developed a course on Asian-American literature that explores literary works as well as
the social/historical context of Asian-American identities. Park, who grew up in Korea,
developed an interest in Korean and Korean-American literature while a graduate student at
Princeton. She proposed Princeton's first course on Asian-American literature, but never
taught the course, leaving Princeton to come to Union.
“Asian-American literature is a completely new field that didn't exist a decade or
two ago, which makes it very exciting,” Park says. In fact, this new area intrigues
her so much that she will take a leave of absence next year to teach at a Korean
university and conduct research on Korean and Korean-American literature.
“I think that Asian-American literature is something I will continue to work on
bit by bit, but I imagine I will remain primarily a Victorianist,” she says.