Ethan Waddell, PhD’24, has been playing in rock bands since middle school, but it wasn’t until he came to UChicago that he figured out how to combine his passion for music with his academic interest in literature. Now an assistant professor of Korean at the University of Colorado Boulder and the bassist in a shoegaze band called Precocious Neophyte (“Two GRE words crunched together,” notes Waddell), he studies how twentieth-century Korean authors incorporated popular music into their writing.

“I was fortunate enough to be encouraged by my professors to pursue this intersection between music and literature,” says Waddell. A class he took on Japanese Cold War film, literature, and music with Michael Bourdaghs, Robert S. Ingersoll Professor in East Asian Languages and Civilizations, inspired his first writing on the subject.

He decided to explore the “genres of pop songs that had been least addressed in English-language scholarship.” These included trot and psychedelic rock.

Trot is a “melancholy” and “melodramatic” genre that developed in Korea under Japanese occupation in the 1920s and 1930s but rose to prominence—and warmed up to sunnier compositions—in the 1960s with the development of the popular music industry.

The popularity of trot coincided with a time of major political change and urbanization under Park Chung Hee, president of South Korea from 1962 to 1979. Many “saw him at first as this figure of hope who could recover Korea’s cultural tradition, as well as boost the economy,” says Waddell.

However, that vision began to fade by the mid-1960s. “With the onset of these rapid changes, and what felt like the loss of the past in the name of a prosperous future, people really started to long for what was being lost,” says Waddell. “And so literary fiction, along with music, became a means for people to reconnect with the vanishing spaces of their rural hometowns.”

Trot’s relationship to Korean cultural tradition is complex. “It was the first popular music genre in Korea developed under imperial Japan,” says Waddell. “Since liberation in 1945, the genre has continued to stir controversies over whether it signifies authentic Korean identity or whether it’s a vessel for the intrusion of foreign cultures.”

“My goal was to see if I could somehow connect that broader history of the trot controversies and revival with what was going on within literary fiction,” he adds.

He found that references to trot showed up repeatedly in what he refers to as “narratives of rural homecoming,” which were popular in the 1960s. These were “stories about characters who are returning to their hometowns after going to the cities, perhaps receiving a college education.” Some of the stories even parallel the standard structure of trot songs, Waddell found, with sections of narrative exposition standing in for instrumental interludes, and extensive quotations—of song lyrics, for example—standing in for song verses.

As the protagonists have the bittersweet experience of seeing their hometowns through new eyes, they “become informal ethnographers, or self-ethnographers.” In the face of government censorship, references to trot music became a useful tool for authors to communicate the pervasive malaise of the time. “To hear the contradictions of trot itself manifesting through the voices of these authors I found really fascinating.”

Hoyt Long, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Japanese Literature in East Asian Languages and Civilizations and EALC department chair, says Waddell works “to get outside the boundaries of the study of literature as a discipline and try to think about how literature and stories and narrative circulate with visual, auditory, and other forms.” In Long’s words, “He really showed that to tell a history of either literature or music, you need both.”

By the early 1970s, says Waddell, “cultural policies in Korea were becoming more and more authoritarian.” Art featuring topics like drugs and sex, as well as foreign influences, was subject to censorship, and artists who were critical of the government faced persecution. Nevertheless, a vibrant youth counterculture developed, with writers drawing inspiration from popular music, including psychedelic rock.

“Psychedelic rock developed its own internal codes that were recognizable and that transmitted certain stable meanings,” says Waddell.

He found parallels to these codes in the work of authors such as Ch'oe In-ho, who reproduces the heavily distorted jams used in psychedelic rock to “facilitate catharsis in the listener” by erasing the separation between individual and collective consciousness.” Ch'oe mimics this effect with “a big block of text that has random scraps from newspaper articles alongside indirect speech overheard on the street and then, perhaps, some song lyrics thrown in as well, all separated by ellipses.”

Another psychedelic code Waddell identified in Ch'oe’s writing is that of “upward flight,” meant to symbolize “a drug-induced trip to a higher plane of consciousness.” However, Ch'oe inverts this motif in his story “Deep Blue Night” (1982), in which a disillusioned author and a musician undertake an increasingly surreal journey from San Francisco to Los Angeles that parallels a bad trip. At the end, the author character collapses on a beach, feeling defeated—cynical about the rule of law and personally dissatisfied with his past vanity and pursuit of desire.

The story was published as the counterculture movement was declining and at a time of great political violence immediately after the assassination of Park Chung Hee and a coup d’état by Chun Doo-hwan (president from 1980 to 1987), and Waddell interprets the climax of “Deep Blue Night” as Ch'oe’s deflation in the face of two consecutive military dictatorships and a dismissal of his cultural role as self-indulgent. In this sense, the story could be read as Ch'oe’s “apology for all of the countercultural literature that he had written previously,” says Waddell. Yet the story is unapologetically psychedelic and includes the first explicit depiction of drug use in Ch'oe’s work. In Waddell’s view, Ch'oe’s use of psychedelic rock codes became a way for the author to “express some form of dissidence even in this act of expressing defeat.”

Waddell sheds light not only on changes within Korean culture, explains Kyeong-Hee Choi, associate professor of modern Korean literature in EALC, but also on Korea’s relationship to the world. For Choi, Waddell’s work “has opened up a new path of intermedial and interdisciplinary literary scholarship that does due justice to the complex ways in which Korean literature and culture have transitioned … from being mere importers of popular culture of foreign origin to being notable catalysts for a newly emergent global culture.”

“The question of how to bridge this gap between literature and music is still something that I am wrestling with,” says Waddell, but what is clear is that music didn’t serve just as a tool of cultural criticism for authors. By incorporating musical lyrics and structures into their work, authors were also interpreting these songs for their readers. “Literature,” he says, “is shaping how people are hearing songs.”