Tag
Korea
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“Can the Dead Save the Living?”: Reading Han Kang During South Korea’s Martial Law Crisis
Can literature, by preserving past trauma, stop history from repeating itself?
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Whose Homeland? Whose Security?
American overseas imperialism functions most powerfully through its infrastructures—debt, education, bureaucracy, mobility—filtered through DHS.
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Between Coldness and Adoration: A Zainichi Korean’s Experience in Japan
“I urge Japanese readers to take another look at their elementary and middle school textbooks.”
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“Parasite” and the Plurality of Empire
Bong Joon-ho’s critique in Parasite is less of “universal” capitalism than of the particular imperialisms that have shaped Korean life.
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“The Girl I Loved Was in a Cult”
North Korean refugees, among other refugees, have been sharing their stories of high-stakes escapes. American university students, among other women, have …
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How the “Omega Male” Becomes a Psychopath
Among the many prurient pleasures offered by contemporary literature are thrillers hawking creative mistreatments of women. The subgenre’s prime was the …
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Our Migrant World
Within the rhetorical toolbox of contemporary political discourse, the language used to characterize international migration, refugee crises, and border crossings might fairly be called impoverished. “Waves” of refugees are “flooding” the West, which is “overwhelmed” by the “swamp” of new arrivals; or, to swap a logic of inundation for one of infestation, migrants “swarm” their…
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Forms of Taboo, Forms of Love
Sonya Chung’s new novel, The Loved Ones, is in constant danger of being about just one thing, even though it’s richly and intelligently about how that one thing is …
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The Model-Minority Bubble
Perhaps the most famous shopping trip in American literature can be found in Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel White Noise. Wounded by a colleague’s unflattering assessment of his appearance, Jack Gladney turns to impulse buying as a form of self-help. “The more money I spent, the less important it seemed. I was bigger than these sums,”…
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A Handmaiden’s Tale
A hit at this year’s Cannes film festival and when it opened in Korea over the summer, The Handmaiden (Ah-ga-ssi) is now in limited release. This stylish and twisty Korean thriller remains true to the oeuvre of its director, revenge-plot master Park Chan-wook (Oldboy, 2003; Lady Vengeance, 2005), and to its source text, the novel…
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Sex, Violence, and “The Vegetarian”
The verdict is in. Han Kang’s The Vegetarian has not only received glowing praise from British and American literary supplements; it has become the first Korean novel to be shortlisted for a Booker Prize. One reviewer found it “glorious,” a “ferocious, magnificently death-affirming novel,” another a “bracing, visceral, system-shocking addition to the Anglophone reader’s diet.”1 Speaking…
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Thornfield Hall, Brooklyn
On her author website, Patricia Park explains that her decision to revisit Jane Eyre in her debut novel, Re Jane, derives in part from the fact that, when she acted out as a child, her Korean mother “would say in her limited English, ‘You act like orphan!’” Park adds, “This always puzzled me—how can you…
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Virtual Roundtable on the Library of Korean Literature
In this virtual roundtable, edited and introduced by Seo Hee Im, Koreanists and scholars of world literature reflect on five writers recently published in the Library of Korean Literature series by Dalkey Archive Press. • Joe Cleary on Choi In-hun, The Square • Wai Chee Dimock on Lee Ki-ho, At Least We Can Apologize •…
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Rebellious Anti-Rebels
Kyung-sook Shin’s I’ll Be Right There, originally published in South Korea in 2010, features illness, injury, rape, kidnappings, and at least four types of suicide, one of which is possibly murder. This excess will not surprise readers familiar with Shin from Please Look After Mom (2008), in which a country mother disappears during a visit to…
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Changing Landscapes
The Museum of Modern Art recently completed its 13th annual Documentary Fortnight, a two-week festival of international nonfiction film. In a city flush with film screenings, the Fortnight is notable for its wide-ranging social interests as well as its commitment to the limits of documentary form. “So much that defines documentary today is about the…
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Periphery to Periphery
Paris, New York, and London: these are the world literary capitals that have historically attracted and nurtured aspiring artists, who in turn have mythologized such cities by lovingly evoking them in their work.1 literature.” The World Republic of Letters, translated by M. B. DeBevoise (Harvard University Press, 2004), pp. 24–30. ] But after so many repeat…
