Global Perspectives on Korean Literature

Global Perspectives on Korean Literature PDF Author: Wook-Dong Kim
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 9811387273
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 282

Book Description
This book explores Korean literature from a broadly global perspective from the mid-9th century to the present, with special emphasis on how it has been influenced by, as well as it has influenced, literatures of other nations. Beginning with the Korean version of the King Midas and his ass’s ears tale in the Silla dynasty, it moves on to discuss Ewa, what might be called the first missionary novel about Korea written by a Western missionary W. Arthur Noble. The book also considers the extent to which in writing fiction and essays Jack London gained grist for his writing from his experience in Korea as a Russo-Japanese War correspondent. In addition, the book explores how modern Korean poetry, fiction, and drama, despite differences in time and space, have actively engaged with Western counterparts. Based on World Literature, which has gained slow but prominent popularity all over the world, this book argues that Korean literature deserves to be part of the Commonwealth of Letters.

The Korean War

The Korean War PDF Author: Wada Haruki
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538116421
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 424

Book Description
This classic history of the Korean War—from its origins through the armistice—is now available in a paperback edition including a substantive introduction that considers the heightened danger of a new Northeast Asian war as Trump and Kim Jong-un escalate their rhetoric. Wada Haruki, one of the world’s leading scholars of the war, draws on archival and other primary sources in Russia, China, the United States, South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan to provide the first full understanding of the Korean War as an international conflict from the perspective of all the actors involved. Wada traces the North Korean invasion of South Korea in riveting detail, providing new insights into the behavior of Kim Il Sung and Syngman Rhee. He also provides new insights into the behavior of Communist leaders in Korea, China, Russia, Eastern Europe, and their rivals in other nations. He traces the course of the war from its origins in the North and South Korean leaders’ failed attempts to unify their country by force, ultimately escalating into a Sino-American war on the Korean Peninsula. Although sixty-five years have passed since the armistice, the Korean conflict has never really ended. Tensions remain high on the peninsula as Washington and Pyongyang, as well as Seoul and Pyongyang, continue to face off. It is even more timely now to address the origins of the Korean War, the nature of the confrontation, and the ways in which it affects the geopolitical landscape of Northeast Asia and the Pacific region. With his unmatched ability to draw on sources from every country involved, Wada paints a rich and full portrait of a conflict that continues to generate controversy.

Korea and the World

Korea and the World PDF Author: Dajeong Chung
Publisher: Lexington Studies on Korea's Place in International Relations
ISBN: 9781498591126
Category : Korea
Languages : en
Pages : 220

Book Description
This book provides fresh perspectives on the historical development and contemporary problems of North and South Korea.

Literature and Film in Cold War South Korea

Literature and Film in Cold War South Korea PDF Author: Theodore Hughes
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231500718
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 287

Book Description
Korean writers and filmmakers crossed literary and visual cultures in multilayered ways under Japanese colonial rule (1910–1945). Taking advantage of new modes and media that emerged in the early twentieth century, these artists sought subtle strategies for representing the realities of colonialism and global modernity. Theodore Hughes begins by unpacking the relations among literature, film, and art in Korea's colonial period, paying particular attention to the emerging proletarian movement, literary modernism, nativism, and wartime mobilization. He then demonstrates how these developments informed the efforts of post-1945 writers and filmmakers as they confronted the aftershocks of colonialism and the formation of separate regimes in North and South Korea. Hughes puts neglected Korean literary texts, art, and film into conversation with studies on Japanese imperialism and Korea's colonial history. At the same time, he locates post-1945 South Korean cultural production within the transnational circulation of texts, ideas, and images that took place in the first three decades of the Cold War. The incorporation of the Korean Peninsula into the global Cold War order, Hughes argues, must be understood through the politics of the visual. In Literature and Film in Cold War South Korea, he identifies ways of seeing that are central to the organization of a postcolonial culture of division, authoritarianism, and modernization.

Infected Korean Language, Purity Versus Hybridity

Infected Korean Language, Purity Versus Hybridity PDF Author: Chong-sŏk Ko
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781604978711
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 310

Book Description
This book is in the Cambria Sinophone World Series (General Editor: Victor H. Mair). Although numerous book-length studies of language and modernity in China and Japan can be found even in English, little has been written in any language on the question of linguistic modernity in Korea. Infected Korean Language, Purity Versus Hybridity by noted journalist and writer Koh Jongsok is a collection of critical essays about Korean language and writing situated at the nexus of modern Korean history, politics, linguistics, and literature. In addition to his journalistic and writing experience, Koh also happens to have a keen interest in language and linguistics, and he has received postgraduate training at the highest level in these subjects at the Sorbonne. This book bears witness to the trials and tribulations-historical, technical and epistemological-by which the Korean language achieved "linguistic modernity" under trying colonial and neo-colonial circumstances. In particular, Koh tackles questions of language ideology and language policy, modern terminology formation, and inscriptional practices (especially the highly politicized questions of vernacular script versus Chinese characters, and of orthography) in an informed and sensitive way. The value of Koh's essays lies in the fact that so little has been written in a critical and politically progressive vein-whether scholarly or otherwise-about the processes whereby traditional Korean inscriptional and linguistic practices became "modern." Indeed, the one group of academics from whom one would expect assistance in this regard, the "national language studies" scholars in Korea, have been so blinkered by their nationalist proclivities as to produce little of interest in this regard. Koh, by contrast, is one of precious few concerned and engaged public intellectuals and creative writers writing on this topic in an easily understandable way. Little or nothing is available in English about modern Korean language ideologies and linguistic politics. This book analyzes the linguistic legacies of the traditional Sinographic Cosmopolis and modern Japanese colonialism and shows how these have been further complicated by the continued and ever-more hegemonic presence of English in post-Liberation Korean linguistic life. It exposes and critiques the ways in which the Korean situation is rendered even more complex by the fact that all these issues have been debated in Korea in an intellectual environment dominated by deeply conservative and racialized notions of "purity," minjok (ethno-nation) and kugo or "national language" (itself an ideological formation owing in large part to Korea's experience with Japan). Koh sheds light on topics like: linguistic modernity and the problem of dictionaries and terminology; Korean language purism and the quest for "pure Korean" on the part of Korean linguistic nationalists; the beginnings of literary Korean in translation and the question of "translationese" in Korean literature; the question of the boundaries of "Korean literature" (if an eighteenth-century Korean intellectual writes a work of fiction in Classical Chinese, is it "Korean literature"?); the vexed issue of the "genetic affiliation" of Korean and the problems with searches for linguistic "bloodlines"; the frequent conflation of language and writing (i.e., of Korean and han'gul) in Korea; the English-as-Official-Language debate in South Korea; the relationship between han'gul and Chinese characters; etc. This book will be of value to those with an interest in language and history in East Asian in general, as well twentieth-century Korean language, literature, politics and history, in particular. The book will be an unprecedented and invaluable resource for students of modern Korean language and literature.

Global Easts

Global Easts PDF Author: Jie-Hyun Lim
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231556640
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 194

Book Description
South Korean historian Jie-Hyun Lim, raised under an anticommunist dictatorship, turned to Marxian thought to explain his country’s development, even as he came to struggle with its Eurocentrism. As a transnational scholar working in postcommunist Poland, Lim recognized striking similarities between Korean and Polish history and politics. One realization stood out: Both Korea and Poland—at once the “West” for Asia yet “Eastern” Europe—had been assigned the role of “East.” This book explores entangled Easts to reconsider global history from the margins. Examining the politics of history and memory, Lim reveals the affinities linking Eastern Europe and East Asia. He draws out commonalities in their experiences of modernity, in their transitions from dictatorship to democracy, and in the shaping of collective memory. Ranging across Poland, Germany, Israel, Japan, and Korea, Lim traces the global history of how notions of victimhood have become central to nationalism. He criticizes mass dictatorships of right and left in the Global Easts, considering Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt’s notion of sovereign dictatorship and the concept of decisionist democracy. Lim argues that nationalism is inherently transnational, critiquing how the nationalist imagination of the Global East has influenced countries across borders. Theoretically sophisticated and conceptually innovative, this book sheds new light on the transnational complexity of historical memory and imagination, the boundaries between democracy and mass dictatorship, and the fluidity of East and West.

Marxist Perspectives on South Korea in the Global Economy

Marxist Perspectives on South Korea in the Global Economy PDF Author: Martin Hart-Landsberg
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 135191958X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 287

Book Description
This volume brings together work by international scholars to provide a unique analysis of the past, present and possible future trajectory of Korea's political economy from a distinctly Marxist perspective. The volume differentiates the Marxian approach to the political economy of Korean development from the Keynesian, social democratic approach that currently dominates the critical literature. In doing so the volume provides a unique view of the development of the South Korean Economy.

North Korea

North Korea PDF Author: Heonik Kwon
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN: 1442215771
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 234

Book Description
This timely, pathbreaking study of North Korea’s political history and culture sheds invaluable light on the country’s unique leadership continuity and succession. Leading scholars Heonik Kwon and Byung-Ho Chung begin by tracing Kim Il Sung’s rise to power during the Cold War. They show how his successor, his eldest son, Kim Jong Il, sponsored the production of revolutionary art to unleash a public political culture that would consolidate Kim’s charismatic power and his own hereditary authority. The result was the birth of a powerful modern theater state that sustains North Korean leaders’ sovereignty now to a third generation. In defiance of the instability to which so many revolutionary states eventually succumb, the durability of charismatic politics in North Korea defines its exceptional place in modern history. Kwon and Chung make an innovative contribution to comparative socialism and postsocialism as well as to the anthropology of the state. Their pioneering work is essential for all readers interested in understanding North Korea’s past and future, the destiny of charismatic power in modern politics, the role of art in enabling this power.

Routledge Handbook of Modern Korean Literature

Routledge Handbook of Modern Korean Literature PDF Author: Yoon Sun Yang
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317224132
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 425

Book Description
The Routledge Handbook of Modern Korean Literature provides a comprehensive overview of a Korean literary tradition, which is understood as a multifaceted nexus of practices, both homegrown and transnational. The handbook discusses the perspectives from which modern Korean literature has thus far been defined, analyzing which voices have been enunciated, underappreciated, or completely silenced and how we can enrich our understanding of it. Taking up diverse transnational and interdisciplinary standpoints, this volume aims to encourage readers not to treat modern Korean literature as a self-evident category but to examine it anew as an uncultivated and uncharted space, unearthing its internal chasms and global connections. Divided into five parts, the themes covered include the following: Literature and power Borders and boundaries Rationality in literature and its limits Language, ethnicity, and translation Korean literature in the changing mediascape. By introducing new conceptual paradigms to the field of modern Korean literature, this book will appeal to students and scholars of Korean, East Asian, and world literature alike.

Musical Modernism in Global Perspective

Musical Modernism in Global Perspective PDF Author: Björn Heile
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009491687
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 285

Book Description
In the first study of the global dimensions of musical modernism, Björn Heile proposes a novel theory according to which musical modernism is constituted by a global diasporic network of composers, musicians and institutions. In a series of historical and analytical case studies from different parts of the world, this book overcomes the respective limitations of both Eurocentric and postcolonial, revisionist accounts, focusing instead on the transnational entanglements between the West and other world regions. Key topics include migration, the transnational reception and transfer of musical works and ideas, institutions such as the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) and composers who are rarely discussed in Western academia, such as the Nigerian-born Akin Euba and the Korean-German Younghi Pagh-Paan. Influenced by the interdisciplinary notion of 'entangled histories', Heile critiques established dichotomies, all the while highlighting the unequal power relations on which the existing global order is founded.