Alex Yim (he/him) is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences from Orlando majoring in English. His primary research rests in postcolonialism, the theory of the novel, and the practice of literary criticism. Some related intellectual pursuits encompass the applications of the digital humanities to modernist and institutional studies. His current project examines the trope of the ‘Kubo’ figure in Korean modernist literature as an emblem against Japanese colonialism and westernization, an amalgam of several of his research interests—with an exploration in Korean culture and its trauma. Outside of the classroom, Alex is often trying local coffee shops, collecting rare first-edition books, or watching films at PFS.
Alex Yim
Wolf Humanities Center Undergraduate Fellow
2023—2024 Forum on Revolution
Alex Yim
English
CAS, 2025
Kubo Walks: Character, Global Modernism, and the Literary World-System
Departing from studies of global modernism and the literary-world system as issues of genre, scale, and vernacular, my project examines what happens to such discourses with an emphasis on the role of character, type, and typicality. My project focuses on the Korean modernist writer Park Taewon's novella A Day in the Life of Kubo, the Novelist (1934), where, through its titular character Kubo, I trace a geneaology of its character type across its literary influences and interlocutors. Drawing on Pascale Casanova's literary world system and Joe Cleary's discussion of realism and modernism, this project considers how character can contend and constellate the grey areas surrounding existing theories of global modernism and literature.