Donald N. Clark

The North and South Korean political systems : a comparative analysis

Part 1 The Korean political heritage: a historical overview political culture and traditions nativistic resilience, nationalism, and beyond. Part 2 Contemporary political settings: politics of partition ideology and the Korean experiments. Part 3 The North Korean political system - a totalitarian political order: the North Korean political framework formal political structures and their evolution the ruling elites and their political vicissitudes Kim Il Sungs rise and retention of power. Part 3 The South Korean political system - a democratizing political order: the South Korean political framework formal governmental structures and political process the ruling elites and their modal characteristics legitimacy crisis - from Rhee to Roh. Part 4 North and South Korean economic orientation - mobilization versus motivation: resource endowments and natural condition economic systems, policies and strategies performance in comparison. Part 5 Critical issues and problems: the seizure of power in North and South Korean politics arms race and the twin fortifications of the Korean Peninsula a socialist man versus a universal man - education in North and South Korean politics reunification of policy models. Conclusion: North and South Korea as two living political laboratories.

Voice from the North: Resurrecting Regional Identity through the Life and Work of Yi Sihang (1672–1736) by Sun Joo Kim (review)

guage with the ethnic-nation; and the imperial call to the colonized to participate in the imperial language (called the “national language”) of the New East Asia Order. Chapter 7 builds on the analysis of Yi T’aejun’s Lectures of Composition in order to take a new approach to Yi’s short fiction written in the 1930s. Hanscom shows how Yi puts the theories developed in the Lectures into practice in his literary texts by taking a critical antimodern stance on the level of content while developing a lyrical mode of narration on the level of form that questions notions of time, space, and referentiality associated with modernization, the imperial project, and the realist narrative. Hanscom emphasizes the ways in which the lyrical in Yi T’aejun’s works does not point to a socially disengaged form. Rather, the lyrical operates by way of a two-step process— first the emotional reaction to phenomena followed by the crafting of emotion into narrative depiction. Reached through a process of composition that moves from phenomena to the individual and back to the social, the lyrical mode in Yi T’aejun thus dismantles the illusion of a self-contained, full subjectivity. Yi’s modernism, Hanscom demonstrates, continues the acknowledgment of the inadequacy of representational language while offering a critique of Eurocentric modernity. The Real Modern: Literary Modernism and the Crisis of Representation in Late Colonial Korea is a pathbreaking book. Hanscom completely revises our thinking about modern Korean literary history and the relations among politics, aesthetics, and modernism in colonial Korea. His work combines in-depth research with meticulous, carefully crafted arguments to give us a new understanding of the works of Pak T’aewŏn, Kim Yujŏng, and Yi T’aejun, 1930s modernism, the 1930s cultural scene, and colonial modernity itself. This book is a must-read for literary scholars and historians working on East Asia, as well as for scholars working on global and comparative modernisms. Hanscom has given us a tour de force.

Encounter: A Novel of Nineteenth-Century Korea (review)

economic development, urbanization, industrialization, and globalization that affect the prospects for reunification. Koreans lived as a divided nation for so long that the division has become part of its national identity. Of course, more recent events, including the election of Kim Youngsam, the death of Kim Il Sung, and ongoing negotiations between North Korea, the U.S., and the international community regarding the proliferation of nuclear weapons may cast a different light on the prospects for rapprochement. New events and the subsequent analysis and interpretation of them will undoubtedly add more layers of complexity to the already difficult topic of reunification.