Tracing how anxieties, insecurities, and moral desire about English instilled through South Korea's neoliberal transformation led to the country's heated pursuit of English in the 1990s and 2000s, this book presents subjectivity as a theoretical and analytical perspective for studying the intersection of language and political economy.

Joseph Sung-Yul Park is Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the National University of Singapore. He is the author of The Local Construction of a Global Language: Ideologies of English in South Korea and co-author of Markets of English: Linguistic Capital and Language Policy in a Globalizing World and A Reference Grammar of Wappo.

• Acknowledgements


• Chapter 1: Introduction


• The World in Pursuit of English


• Researching English in the Global Economy


• Subjectivity as a Critical Perspective on Neoliberalism


• English, Neoliberalism, and Subjectivity in South Korea


• Outline of this Book


• Chapter 2: Language and Subjectivity in Neoliberalism


• Defining Neoliberalism


• Theorizing Neoliberalism: Political Economy of Subjectivity


• Languaging Subjectivity: Methodological Notes


• Conclusions


• Chapter 3: English and Neoliberalism in South Korea


• Neoliberal South Korea: A Portrait of Hell


• Korea's Neoliberal Transformation: History, Actors, Processes


• Korea's English Fever and its Neoliberal Grounding


• Subjective Foundations of the English Fever: A Historical Perspective


• Conclusions


• Chapter 4: Language as Pure Potential: Crafting a Desire for English


• Who Desires English?


• Desire, Neoliberalism, and Language Ideology


• Language as Pure Potential


• Cosmopolitan Desire and Dreams of Self-realization


• Desire and the Crafting of New Subjectivities


• Conclusions


• Chapter 5: Language Learning as Technology of the Self: The Moral Grounding of English


• English and inequality in Neoliberalism


• Morality and Technologies of the Self


• Success Stories of English Language Learning in the Conservative Press


• The Successful Learner of English as a Moral Figure


• English Language Learning as Technology of Self


• Conclusions


• Chapter 6: The Biopolitics of Language Learning: Youth, English, and Anxiety


• Youth as a Valuable Resource


• Language Learning as Biopolitics


• Early English Education and Anxieties of the Future


• Anxieties of Early Study Abroad: Fears of Being Lost in Time


• Beyond Youth


• Conclusions


• Chapter 7: Deferring to the Other: English and Linguistic Insecurity


• Commodification and Competing Ideologies of Language


• Reframing Linguistic Insecurity


• Korean Mid-level Managers in Non-Korean Multinational Corporations


• Linguistic Insecurity in the Korean Managers' Discourse


• Coloniality and the Neoliberal Valorization of English


• Conclusions


• Chapter 8: Becoming Precarious Subjects: The Unfulfilled Promise of English


• Precarity as Subjective Condition


• Promise of English in a State of Precarity


• The rise and fall of TOEIC


• Consequences for Precarity


• Conclusions


• Chapter 9: Conclusions


• Rethinking English, Neoliberalism, and Subjectivity


• Towards a Global Account of English and Neoliberalism


• Subjectivity in Language and Political Economy


• References