Readings in Modern Korean Literature

Readings in Modern Korean Literature PDF Author: Yung-Hee Kim
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824826277
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
Readings in Modern Korean Literature provides advanced students (those with at least four years of college-level training in Korean) with materials that will help them understand and appreciate modern Korean literary traditions as well as challenge them to use their Korean-language competence to the fullest extent. It offers the student a wide range of literary writing, including three different genres of poetry, short stories, and essays. Each piece is accompanied by a vocabulary glossary and notes, explanations of socio-cultural details, an introduction to the author, and a translation. The textbook is distinguished by a variety of exercises designed to enhance students’ proficiency in referential reading, writing, and comprehension skills.

Readings in Modern Korean Literature

Readings in Modern Korean Literature PDF Author: Yung-Hee Kim
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824826277
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 386

Get Book Here

Book Description
Readings in Modern Korean Literature provides advanced students (those with at least four years of college-level training in Korean) with materials that will help them understand and appreciate modern Korean literary traditions as well as challenge them to use their Korean-language competence to the fullest extent. It offers the student a wide range of literary writing, including three different genres of poetry, short stories, and essays. Each piece is accompanied by a vocabulary glossary and notes, explanations of socio-cultural details, an introduction to the author, and a translation. The textbook is distinguished by a variety of exercises designed to enhance students’ proficiency in referential reading, writing, and comprehension skills.

Questioning Minds

Questioning Minds PDF Author:
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824837584
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
Available for the first time in English, the ten short stories by modern Korean women collected here touch in one way or another on issues related to gender and kinship politics. All of the protagonists are women who face personal crises or defining moments in their lives as gender-marked beings in a Confucian, patriarchal Korean society. Their personal dreams and values have been compromised by gender expectations or their own illusions about female existence. They are compelled to ask themselves "Who am I?" "Where am I going?" "What are my choices?" Each story bears colorful and compelling testimony to the life of the heroine. Some of the stories celebrate the central character’s breakaway from the patriarchal order; others expose sexual inequality and highlight the struggle for personal autonomy and dignity. Still others reveal the abrupt awakening to mid-life crises and the seasoned wisdom that comes with accepting the limits of old age. The stories are arranged in chronological order, from the earliest work by Korea’s first modern woman writer in 1917 to stories that appeared in 1995—approximately one from each decade. Most of the writers presented are recognized literary figures, but some are lesser-known voices. The introduction presents a historical overview of traditions of modern Korean women’s fiction, situating the selected writers and their stories in the larger context of Korean literature. Each story is accompanied by a biographical note on the author and a brief critical analysis. A selected bibliography is provided for further reading and research. Questioning Minds marks a departure from existing translations of Korean literature in terms of its objectives, content, and format. As such it will contribute to the growth of Korean studies, increasing the availability of material for teaching Korean literature in English, and stimulate readership of its writers beyond the confines of the peninsula.

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

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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.

Figuring Korean Futures

Figuring Korean Futures PDF Author: Dafna Zur
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503603113
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
This book is the story of the emergence and development of writing for children in modern Korea. Starting in the 1920s, a narrator-adult voice began to speak directly to a child-reader. This child audience was perceived as unique because of a new concept: the child-heart, the perception that the child's body and mind were transparent and knowable, and that they rested on the threshold of culture. This privileged location enabled writers and illustrators, educators and psychologists, intellectual elite and laypersons to envision the child as a powerful antidote to the present and as an uplifting metaphor of colonial Korea's future. Reading children's periodicals against the political, educational, and psychological discourses of their time, Dafna Zur argues that the figure of the child was particularly favorable to the project of modernity and nation-building, as well as to the colonial and postcolonial projects of socialization and nationalization. She demonstrates the ways in which Korean children's literature builds on a trajectory that begins with the child as an organic part of nature, and ends, in the post-colonial era, with the child as the primary agent of control of nature. Figuring Korean Futures reveals the complex ways in which the figure of the child became a driving force of nostalgia that stood in for future aspirations for the individual, family, class, and nation.

Gendered Landscapes

Gendered Landscapes PDF Author: Yung-Hee Kim
Publisher: Cornell East Asia Series
ISBN: 9781939161871
Category : Korean fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Anthology of 9 short stories and novellas by Korean women writers published between 1935 and 1998. Stories depict Korean women's lives from the mid-1930s to the end of the twentieth century.

When the Future Disappears

When the Future Disappears PDF Author: Janet Poole
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231538553
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
Taking a panoramic view of Korea's dynamic literary production in the final decade of Japanese rule, When the Future Disappears locates the imprint of a new temporal sense in Korean modernism: the impression of time interrupted, with no promise of a future. As colonial subjects of an empire headed toward total war, Korean writers in this global fascist moment produced some of the most sophisticated writings of twentieth-century modernism. Yi T'aejun, Ch'oe Myongik, Im Hwa, So Insik, Ch'oe Chaeso, Pak T'aewon, Kim Namch'on, and O Changhwan, among other Korean writers, lived through a rare colonial history in which their vernacular language was first inducted into the modern, only to be shut out again through the violence of state power. The colonial suppression of Korean-language publications was an effort to mobilize toward war, and it forced Korean writers to face the loss of their letters and devise new, creative forms of expression. Their remarkable struggle reflects the stark foreclosure at the heart of the modern colonial experience. Straddling cultural, intellectual, and literary history, this book maps the different strategies, including abstraction, irony, paradox, and even silence, that Korean writers used to narrate life within the Japanese empire.

I'll Be Right There

I'll Be Right There PDF Author: Kyung-Sook Shin
Publisher: Other Press, LLC
ISBN: 1590516745
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
“A love story between friends. It is so well written. [Kyung-sook Shin] has this use of language that is just beautiful and poetic. It’s a great book if you’re looking to escape.” —Chelsea Handler, #1 New York Times bestselling author How friendship, European literature, and a charismatic professor defy war, oppression, and the absurd Set in 1980s South Korea amid the tremors of political revolution, I’ll Be Right There follows Jung Yoon, a highly literate, twenty-something woman, as she recounts her tragic personal history as well as those of her three intimate college friends. When Yoon receives a distressing phone call from her ex-boyfriend after eight years of separation, memories of a tumultuous youth begin to resurface, forcing her to re-live the most intense period of her life. With profound intellectual and emotional insight, she revisits the death of her beloved mother, the strong bond with her now-dying former college professor, the excitement of her first love, and the friendships forged out of a shared sense of isolation and grief. Yoon’s formative experiences, which highlight both the fragility and force of personal connection in an era of absolute uncertainty, become immediately palpable. Shin makes the foreign and esoteric utterly familiar: her use of European literature as an interpreter of emotion and experience bridges any gaps between East and West. Love, friendship, and solitude are the same everywhere, as this book makes poignantly clear.

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

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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.

Korean Composition

Korean Composition PDF Author: Pong Ja Paik
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824824778
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
Korean Composition is the first book in English for students of Korean language aimed not only at enhancing their writing skills and overall linguistic competence, but also at organizing and developing their ideas and thoughts with grammatically, stylistically, and culturally correct expressions. The Essential Composition section contains chapters concerned with the writing of essays, diaries and letters, document preparation, and expository writing. The Advanced Composition section considers descriptions of impressions, writing poetry, newspaper accounts, writing articles and theses, and summarizing. Each chapter consists of numerous units designed to cover words, phrases, idioms, and grammatical patterns (with sentence examples). Exercises and a model writing example are included in each unit. Advanced students who need assistance in choosing proper topics and materials as well as in using diverse expressions in creative writing will benefit from the section on steps of composition and styles of writing. English translations of model writings, an index of useful grammatical patterns, and an English-Korean glossary are provided at the end of the text. Korean Composition is aimed at college-level students who have completed at least beginning and intermediate levels of Korean. For students using the Integrated Korean series, this text is recommended for use after the completion of Advanced Intermediate 2.

Writers of the Winter Republic

Writers of the Winter Republic PDF Author: Youngju Ryu
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824856848
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
In 1975, a young high school teacher took the stage at a prayer meeting in a southwestern Korean city to recite a poem called "The Winter Republic." The poem became an anthem against the military dictatorship of Park Chung Hee and his successors; the poet, however, soon found himself in court and then in prison for saddling the authoritarian state with such a memorable moniker. This unique book weaves together literary works, biographical accounts, institutional histories, trial transcripts, and personal interviews to tell the powerful story of how literature became a fierce battleground against authoritarian rule during one of the darkest periods in South Korea's history. Park Chung Hee's military dictatorship was a time of unparalleled political oppression. It was also a time of rapid and unprecedented economic development. Against this backdrop, Youngju Ryu charts the growing activism of Korean writers who interpreted literature's traditional autonomy as a clarion call to action, an imperative to intervene politically in the name of art. Each of the book's four chapters is devoted to a single writer and organized around a trope central to his work. Kim Chi-ha's "bandits," satirizing Park's dictatorship; Yi Mun-gu's "neighbor," evoking old nostalgia and new anxieties; Cho Se-hŭi's dwarf, representing the plight of the urban poor; and Hwang Sok-yong's labor fiction, the supposed herald of the proletarian revolution. Ending nearly two decades of an implicit ban on socially engaged writing, literature of the period became politicized not merely in content and form, but also as an institution. Writers of the Winter Republic emerged as the conscience of their troubled yet formative times. A question of politics lies at the heart of this book, which seeks to understand how and why a time of political oppression and censorship simultaneously expanded the practice and everyday relevance of literature. By animating the lives and works of the men who shaped this period, the book offers readers an illuminating literary, cultural, and political history of the era.