The Land of the Banished

Cho, Chong-Rae

Jimoondang Publishing Company

Three Days in That Autumn is a novella that delves into the grim irony of women's life-giving capacity. A gynecologist facing retirement must reckon with the legacy of her traumatic past. Herself a victim of a rape during the Korean War who had to undergo an abortion, the doctor devotes her career to freeing women from the agony of carrying an unwanted baby. Paradoxically, her obsessive devotion to aborting unplanned pregnancies actually functions as a tool for perpetuating sex as a trade, and her own emotional dysfunction even allows her to find the sardonic pleasure of retaliation in the decrepitude of the women she services. In her final three days of work, however, she comes to recognize her sublimated longing for self-healing and redemption in her sudden inexplicable need to deliver a living life to be loved and cared for.

Three Days in That Autumn

Pak, Wanseo

Very few books on Korean traditional music have been available in Western languages. In view of the present state, this book attempts to deal with historical matters and other aspects of Korean music and Korean musicology. In fact, this volume is an essay collection of my studies written in English during the last 25 years as a musicologist, which range from as early as an article appearing in the academic journal, Ethnomusicology, in 1973 by the Society for Ethnomusicology in USA, to as late as my keynote address at the 2nd International Symposium for Korean Musicology in 1998. 
17 chapters are largely divided into three parts. Part One: " Korean Music and Musicology" with six chapters devoted to the state of contemporary Korean traditional music and the development of Korean musicology; Part Two: "Studies in Korean Music History" (five chapters) discusses the major issue in Korean music history; Part Three: "Aspects of Korean Traditional Music" (six chapters) deals with pansori, sanjo, and other topics in Korean music.

Korean Music Historical and Other Aspects

Song, Bang-song

Shamanism has more or less disappeared, even in Siberia where the word 'Shaman' originated. However, in Korea, a newly-industrialized nation-state, shamanism has not merely survived, but is enjoying a revival as a uniquely Korean cultural heritage to be cherished. 
In this book, the author attempts to unravel its mystery through analyzing historical documents and her own field data. She concludes that the survival of Korean shamanism is linked to the global phenomenon of the revival of ethnicity and cultural nationalism. 
The author, a Korean-born British social anthropologist, provides the reader with not only a wealth of knowledge on Korean shamanism, but also the rationale for its great significance to the Korean people.

Korean Shamanism and Cultural Nationalism

Politics & Social Sciences

Hogarth, Hyun-key Kim

Politics & Government

From Tradition to Consumption is a ground breaking work that provides a wonderfully innovative and insightful explanation of the eclipse of traditional society and the rise of a new consumer culture during South Korea's recent march to economic development. The book convincingly portrays this shift to cultural modernity as the reasoned response of people to rapidly shifting forms of labor, everyday life, and state narratives. Key to this transformation from agriculture to a modern life has been the drastic alteration of the family from a unit of production to a unit of consumption. 
This state-led industrialization also has redefined gender roles in Korea. The pressing needs for production and consumption to bolster economic development have resulted in the creation of a middle-class family marked by the white collar male and urban housewife. These new social roles serve to make the process of consumption central to the family, and to promote the act of consumption as the basis for modern identity for many Koreans

From Tradition to Consumption: Construction of a Capitalist Culture in South Korea

Hart, Dennis

The three stories gathered in this volume display Yi, Sang's inventive manipulation of autobiographical elements, a method which expands his intensely private narratives into broader meditations on love, life, and death. "The Wings," a dark allegory of infidelity and self-deception, probes the ambiguities of perception and language through an unreliable narrator who bears an uncanny resemblance to the author himself. "Encounters and Departures," a tale of ill-fated love revolving around erotic passion and physical illness as metaphors presents a female protagonist modelled on the woman who was, in real life, the author's muse and femme fatale. Similarly, in "Deathly Child," Yi, Sang offers a witty, incisive examination of sexual mores through a fictional reenactment of his ambivalent feelings toward the woman he married toward the end of his life.

The Wings

Yi, Sang

The Ma Rok Biographies

Seo, Giwon

The Camellias

Kim, Yu-jeong

The Other Side of Dark Remembrance was the winner of the 8th Annual Yi Sang Literature Prize in 1984. This novella falls into the fiction genre dealing with the division of North and South Korea. Stories of this genre often hold ideological conflicts and their ramifications at their center; rather than treating these issues upfront, however, The Other Side of Dark Remembrance follows the mundane yet confused life of a metropolitan salaried man. During the process of retracing important contract documents he lost while drunk, the protagonist unexpectedly comes face to face with a dark memory submerged in the subconsciousness of his common bourgeois being. This remembrance of a heartbreaking separation caused by the Korean War ultimately impels him to confront the long-repressed injunction of his mother's last words.

The Other Side of Dark Remembrance

Lee, Kyun-young

"With Her Oil Lamp On, That Night" is a fine example of Lim's short stories. Through the death of an innocent lad, it poignantly depicts the nature of the Korean War, putting its arbitrary division of enemy and ally into question. Written in poetic prose that makes the ironic contrast between the peaceful yet awesome beauty of nature and the homicidal necessity of the war more conspicuous, it artistically excels Lim's other better-known stories. With a small countryside train station as its setting, "Sapyong Station" examines various aspects of underprivileged life illuminated by the passengers waiting for a snow-delayed train. The passengers gathered at the station - farmers, street peddlers, a country girl turned to a bar-maid, a criminal just released from the prison, an expelled student - are themselves like the forgotten station bypassed by the express trains and lead a grim life under the shadow of the military regime and rapid industrialization. However, rather than questioning the social causes of this dire reality, the story leads the reader to dwell on the meaning of life itself without sentimentality.

With Her Oil Lamp On, That Night

Lim, Chul-Woo

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