bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
2010 NAPS Presidential Address: "Fleeing the Uxorious Kingdom": Augustine's Queer Theology of Marriage
Authors: Burrus Virginia
Published: April 2011

Might attending to the texture of bodies in Augustine's theology of marriage open up new interpretive possibilities? Eve Kosofky Sedgwick and Patricia Cox Miller give theoretical cues, Danuta Shanzer philological ones, for a dialogical reading of On the Good of Marriage and Confessions that seeks to defamiliarize, complicate, and broaden—in several senses, to queer —traditional interpretations of Augustinian marital theology. Shame and vulnerability, fear and desire, pain and pleasure, are all surfaced, as Augustine depicts marital figures that are shot through with ambivalence—open and torn, cut and bleeding, both cleaving to one another and ripped apart. Ultimately, he attempts to turn desires that won't quite align as they should toward textual pleasures. If Christ attends, caresses, and enflames through "the mesh of flesh" ( Confessions 13.15.18 [CCL 27:252]), as he puts it, Augustine reaches back toward both flesh and divinity through the mesh of text. Seduction may thereby be drawn toward the border where time touches eternity—where a libidinous love evokes the reciprocal gift of fidelity without demanding it, exceeds itself in fecundity without commodifying its own productivity, and, finally, embracing all by grasping at nothing, touches on a joy that knows no end. Fides—proles—sacramentum . At such a barely imaginable limit-point, marriage has become so expansive—an ever-exceeding love set into the very weave of the cosmos—that he need no longer resist its lure.
The Officia of St. Ambrose's De officiis
Authors: Atkins Jed W.
Published: April 2011

A reader of Ambrose's De officiis who is well acquainted with Cicero's homonymous work will be immediately impressed by the similarities in organization and the structure of argument. However, he or she will also notice that the bishop's ethic contains an element of rigor absent from Cicero's more moderate ethic. By focusing on Ambrose's creative appropriation of the Ciceronian/ Stoic categories of duties ( officia ), I demonstrate how he incorporated this distinctive element of his ethic into his work while still employing the same structure, argument, and terminology as his model. Ambrose uses the first type of officia to critique Cicero's ethic while he redefines the second type of officia and subsequently uses it as a vehicle for expressing the defining characteristics of his own ethic.
Bishops on the Chair of Pestilence: Ambrosiaster's Polemical Exegesis of Psalm 1.1
Authors: Lunn-Rockliffe Sophie
Published: April 2011

This article examines Ambrosiaster's exegesis of Psalm 1 in his quaestio 110, focusing on his strikingly lengthy explanation of the cathedra pestilentiae of Ps 1.1. It locates his interpretation of the cathedra pestilentiae in a particular tradition of Latin anti-heretical scriptural allusion: Cyprian's polemic against rigorists and Optatus of Milevis's denunciation of Donatist antibishops. This illuminates the likely target of this passage as the Donatist antibishop of Rome in the late 370s, Claudian. However, the connections between q. 110 and other quaestiones suggest that Ambrosiaster may also have had the Novatianists in his sights.
Una lettura del Peristephanon 6 di Prudenzio tra Trinità "teologica," trinità "imperiale," e trinità "martiriale"
Authors: Guttilla Giuseppe A.
Published: April 2011

Il testo più antico del martirio del vescovo Fruttuoso e di due suoi diaconi è una passio coeva a questo evento, che ci è pervenuta anonima e che comunemente è citata come Acta Fructuosi o più semplicemente Acta . Accingendosi a narrare la morte tra le fiamme dei tre martiri, l'autore ci dice che, per il loro coraggio, i tre religiosi s'erano rivelati simili ai tre giovani ebrei ch'erano stati condannati dal re Nabucodonosor a morire tra le fiamme, ed aggiunge che le tre Persone della divina Trinità avevano assistito al loro martirio. Anche Ausonio nei Versus Paschales , composti tra il 367 ed il 375, avrebbe usato alcuni motivi che trovava già negli Acta . E tuttavia, dopo avere parlato a lungo nei vv. 16-23 della Trinità celeste, al cui interno Dio Padre occupa una posizione di primo piano, in termini non meno laudativi egli ravvisa una "trinità terrena," di natura imperiale, nella struttura amministrativa che in quegli anni Valentiniano I aveva dato all'impero romano, allorché aveva cooptato al governo dello stato prima il fratello Valente e successivamente il proprio figlio Graziano. Con numerosi ed evidenti riscontri lessicali, nel Perist . 6 Prudenzio avrebbe sostituito alla "trinità imperiale" del carme ausoniano una "trinità" anch'essa terrena, costituita dagli stessi tre martiri spagnoli di cui si parla negli Acta . L'affinità di certe situazioni ed i numerosi riscontri lessicali abbastanza allusivi presenti nei due scritti ci sollecitano a vedere nei Versus un nuovo originale intertesto dell'inno prudenziano, che finora è sfuggito agli studiosi.
Reading Between the Lines: Motives, Beliefs, and Achievement in Adolescent Boys
Authors: Bozack Amanda
Published: April 2011

This study of adolescent boys’ literacy builds on motivation theory and uses the Motivations for Reading Questionnaire (Wigfield, Guthrie, & McGough, 1996) as a foundation. Survey and achievement data were collected from 330 students and eight teachers at a Catholic, all-boys high-school. Results suggest that the motivational constructs identified by Wigfield and colleagues for elementary students remain relatively intact with this sample, but that some motives for reading may change over time. For teachers, believing a student was a good reader was related to beliefs that the student read the assignments; believing that a student should try harder was related to beliefs about knowing what that student struggles with in class. Several modest relationships between questionnaire responses and student achievement scores were also found.
Literary Production, Circulating Libraries, and Private Publishing: The Popular Reception of Vernacular Fiction Texts in the Late Chosŏn Dynasty
Authors: Kim Michael
Published: April 2011

This study examines the appearance of interpretive communities of popular readers in the late Chosŏn period. Popular readers formed around fictional texts that could be borrowed from circulating libraries or purchased from private publishers. While sources that directly address the phenomenon of popular reading during the Chosŏn period are rare, considerable information can be gleaned from Western language publications on Korea and careful attention to the material construction of popular fiction texts. Many Western visitors to Korea had a particular interest in Korean print culture, and their writings can present some valuable insights into the social reception of popular texts and the distribution of vernacular fictional works through markets, bookstores and circulating libraries. The material construction of popular fiction texts also witnessed major changes during this period, and fictional works produced by private publishers and circulating libraries assumed physical forms that were highly suited for the reading practices and preferences of popular readers. While considerably more research on this topic needs to be done, the findings of this study suggests that popular readers could be found throughout late Chosŏn society, and they may have been highly concentrated in areas such as Seoul and among certain social groups like elite women.
The Uses and Abuses of Wŏnhyo and the “T’ong Pulgyo” Narrative
Authors: Cho Eunsu
Published: April 2011

This paper aims to illustrate Wŏnhyo’s place in the modern discourse of Korean nationalism, as the major figure of Korean Buddhist identity. Wŏnhyo (617–686) was a Buddhist monk and one of the key thinkers, writers, and commentators of the Korean Buddhist tradition. In addition to the breadth of Wŏnhyo’s own scholarship on Buddhist scriptures available in seventh-century Silla, Korea, the volume and diversity of scholarship about Wŏnhyo in modern Korea represents the status and history of the development of Buddhist studies in Korea. Wŏnhyo’s approach to Buddhism has been used in contemporary contexts to describe various aspects of Korean life and thought. Most people—scholars and nonacademics alike—have taken for granted the received narrative of Wŏnhyo, a narrative that is now highly nationalized. Following up the argument that has recently arisen among scholars (Shim Jae-ryong and Robert Buswell), linking Ch’oe Namsŏn in the colonial period with the emergence of the syncretic ideology that has grounded contemporary Korean scholarship, I expanded the scope of investigation to include other attempts to write about Wŏnhyo and Korean Buddhism throughout Korean Buddhist history, and their subsequent elaboration in the twentieth century. I explore the spectrum of evolving perspectives on Wŏnhyo, and how modern ideas about him have continued to shift with changing sociopolitical conditions. This will help us to gauge the significance of Wŏnhyo and his scholarship in the creation of a Korean Buddhist identity.
National History and Domestic Spaces: Secret Lives of Girls and Women in 1950s South Korea in O Chȏng-hûi’s “The Garden of Childhood” and “The Chinese Street”
Authors: Lee Jin-kyung
Published: April 2011

Situating O Chông-hûi’s works “The Garden of Childhood” and “The Chinese Street” in the context of masculinist memories of the Korean War, produced in the 1970s and 1980s, the paper argues that O’s two stories offer a feminist reinterpretation of the Korean War and the post–Korean War era. “The Garden of Childhood” reinscribes the Korean War as a space of feminine sexuality emancipated from patriarchal authority, challenging the prevailing representations of mothers and wives as symbolic figures that project ideological reconciliation and national reunification in male writing. The second part of the paper, on “The Chinese Street,” explores the period immediately following the Korean War as the moment of launching of South Korean women as a workforce that is exploited simultaneously by the alliance of patriarchy, dictatorial state and neocolonial U.S. domination. The paper argues that it is the domestic sphere and relations through which working-class women’s labor is mobilized and yet elided and that O’s story deconstructs this linkage between women and family by narrating women’s disaffection from the domestic space. It contends that women’s resistance to the patriarchalized domestic sphere, consequently, works to subvert women’s subordination to the state and the neocolonial hegemony.
Disturbing Images: Rebellion, Usurpation, and Rulership in Early Sixteenth-Century East Asia—Korean Writings on Emperor Wuzong
Authors: Robinson David M.
Published: April 2011

Early in the sixteenth century, highly unflattering, even bizarre, descriptions of the Ming dynasty’s tenth emperor, posthumously known as Wuzong 武宗, the Martial Ancestor (r. 1506–1521) made their way to the Chosŏn court. These pointed criticisms of the emperor and deteriorating domestic conditions within China should be understood in light of developments at the court of King Chungjong 中宗 (r. 1506–1544). In order to provide the proper context for such an interpretation, this essay begins with an overview of the 1510 Rebellion in China, moves to the 1506 coup d’etat that placed King Chungjong on the throne, and then proceeds to Korean views of the 1510 Rebellion and the Martial Ancestor. It argues that the criticisms of the Martial Ancestor were intended to reaffirm the legitimacy of both the new king, Chungjong 中宗, who had come to power through a coup d’état, and perhaps more importantly, the officials who had affected the change.
Sugi’s Collation Notes to the Koryŏ Buddhist Canon and Their Significance for Buddhist Textual Criticism
Authors: Buswell Robert E.
Published: April 2011

Sugi’s (d.u.) thirty fascicles (kwŏn) of collation notes to the carving of the second koryŏ Buddhist canon, finished around 1247, are the only extant records detailing how East Asian Buddhist scholars in the premodern era went about the task of collating and editing multiple recensions of thousands of scriptures into a definitive canon. Despite their importance, these notes have received surprisingly little attention to date from the scholarly community. Sugi’s notes help to document the textual genealogies of the various East Asian canons and provide definitive proof that, in style and format, the second Koryŏ canon imitated both the Song Chinese Kaibao Tripitaka and first Koryŏ canons, but its readings followed more closely those found in the Khitan Liao canon. A careful analysis of Sugi’s editorial process reveals that he was far more facile and astute than Erasmus (1466–1536), who initiated the formal Western art of textual criticism more than two centuries later. Sugi qualifies as a sophisticated editor, who adhered to the most basic canons of internal evidence followed in modern textual criticism. This study concludes with a lengthy appendix summarizing all of Sugi’s seventy-six entries regarding the sixty-five different texts that are specifically analyzed in the collation notes.
Contention in the Construction of a Global Korean Community: The Case of the Overseas Korean Act
Authors: Park Jung-Sun , Chang Paul Y.
Published: April 2011

Amid great controversy, the South Korean National Assembly passed the Overseas Korean Act (OKA) on December 3, 1999. The benefits, which resemble quasi-citizenship rights, are justified by the South Korean government’s drive to redefine and reconstruct Korean identity in the context of an increasingly globalized world. Certain overseas Korean groups are legally included as (quasi) members of the South Korean nation-state, whereas other groups remain legal outsiders. Many people argue that the OKA defines “Korean identity” through technical and legal connections to the nation-state, South Korea, which in turn has larger implications for who does and does not constitute a Korean. Thus, the debate revolves around the confounded notions of national/legal/ethnic identities. Utilizing survey data and qualitative interviews, this article delineates the relationship between the South Korean government’s efforts to legally define Korean identity and a Korean diasporic community’s challenge based on ethnic homogeneity. Findings indicate that there is contention over not only the criteria by which one is defined as “Korean,” but also over the legitimacy of actors privileged to make such distinctions. We also point to the importance of considering historical experiences and geopolitics in shaping identity politics in the current context.
Development as Devolution: Nam Chŏng-hyŏn and the “Land of Excrement” Incident
Authors: Hughes Theodore
Published: April 2011

Working under a strict regime of censorship enforced by the National Security Law, what strategies did south Korean writers use in the 1960s to contest the Cold War developmental trajectory privileged by the authoritarian state? This article examines the ways in which Nam Chŏng-hyŏn (who was prosecuted and convicted of violating the National Security Law in 1967) attempts to reappropriate the body as site of resistance opposing statist development made in the name of the nation. It traces the history of representations of the body in Korean literature, paying particular attention to the intersection between the disassociation of labor from the body in 1950s and 1960s literary texts and the Park Chung Hee regime’s investment of the national body in the commodity form.
Systematization of Film Censorship in Colonial Korea: Profiteering from Hollywood’s First Golden Age, 1926–1936
Authors: Yecies Brian
Published: April 2011

Between 1926 and 1936, cinema in colonial Korea was a vibrant business, involving the production of domestic films and the distribution and exhibition of American, British, Chinese, French, German, Italian, and Russian films. During this decade, the first golden age of American cinema in Korea, Hollywood films overwhelmingly dominated the Korean market. Korea was an important territory that Hollywood used in its overall global expansion campaign. Amid this globalization operation, the Government-General of Chōsen’s film censorship apparatus was a financially self-sustaining operation. It paid for its operation by profiteering from the application of more than 6,700 American and 630 other countries’ feature and nonfeature films, a vast majority of which were approved with minor, if any, censorship changes. The Government-General’s systematization of film censorship policies was intended to obstruct Communist, revolutionary, and later, socialist themes rather than “Western” themes—at least until the late 1930s, when the Japanese Department of Home Affairs began banning the import of American films and the Government-General intensified the suppression of Korean culture.
Negotiating Cultural Identities in Conflict: A Reading of the Writings of Paek Kyŏnghae (1765–1842)
Authors: Kim Sun Joo
Published: April 2011

This article examines the life of Paek Kyŏnghae (1765–1842), a late Chosŏn scholar official from P’yŏngan Province, a region popularly conceived as lacking a yangban pedigree and scholarly tradition, so that its inhabitants were subject to ongoing social contempt and political discrimination. Situating Paek within this regional cultural context and also within the dynastic institutional practices of his time reveals the development of subjective expressions of regional belonging by insiders, as well as equally subjective expressions of regional stereotyping by outsiders. Tracing northern regional identities, as constructed and negotiated in reaction to outsiders’ views, and then locating such regional identities and politics in relation to the central court sheds new light on the personal ordeals that Paek was forced to undergo throughout his career. The compromises and choices that he made at every turn were driven by contradictions between Confucian ideals that honored the principle of meritocracy and dynastic practices that hinged upon long-standing aristocratic tradition. This article exposes the integrative power of dynastic ideology and systems (as well as complex institutional processes) that demanded a high level of conformity from individual participants, thus imposing lifelong agony on a gifted man because of his demeaned place of origin and less-than-desirable pedigree. In methodology, this study provides a critique of nation-centered historiography by highlighting views from the periphery.
The 2002 World Cup and a Local Festival in Cheju: Global Dreams and the Commodification of Shamanism
Authors: Yun Kyoim
Published: April 2011

This article examines how multiple actors participated, both consciously and inadvertently, in commodifying Cheju shamanic tradition during the 2002 World Cup celebrations in South Korea. Approaching this sports event as an opportunity to draw global attention to Cheju and increase tourism on the island, the central and provincial governments sponsored various festivals in which shamanism was frequently appropriated as a cultural commodity. This article focuses on one local festival held on Cheju Island during the international soccer tournament. During the festival, diverse agents—including shamans, local residents, nonstate elites, and representatives from cultural institutions and the national and provincial governments—fashioned Cheju shamanism to foster their imagined global audience’s cultural curiosities. The desire to cultivate Cheju’s prestige mobilized a variety of people. However, in the process of controlling and directing customary rituals for public display in specific performance situations, the participants’ asymmetrical social positions and their different expectations and interests inevitably led to tension. Furthermore, the poor domestic and foreign attendance at festival events and the scant media coverage they received confirmed the nation’s preexisting power differentials, which globalization discourse and practices often mask.
Consuming Visions: The Crowds of the Korean World Cup
Authors: Joo Rachael Miyung
Published: April 2011

The 2002 Korea-Japan FIFA World Cup produced a monumental response by Koreans, both in South Korea and beyond. Millions of fans clad in red T-shirts spilled onto public streets to cheer for the Korea Football Team. These crowds functioned as media publics mobilized through mass media coverage of the event. Prescribed consumer practices and their effective display in public contexts shaped the uniform characteristics of the crowds. The crowds signaled important changes in the role of the state within a neo-liberal political atmosphere. They also demonstrated shifts in the gendered frameworks of national mass mobilizations. Through their behavior, Korean participants in the World Cup celebrations showed that media technologies shape how Koreans understand and express themselves as national subjects within this era of globalization. The political significance of the World Cup crowds resides in people’s lived experiences, and their recognition of the potential of human mobilizations to enact social and political change.
Korean Medicine’s Globalization Project and Its Powerscapes
Authors: Kim Jongyoung
Published: April 2011

In an effort to expand its boundaries by including science and industry in its realm, Korean medicine (KM) has undertaken a variety of globalization projects. KM’s entrance into the global scientific community is intended to enhance its scientific status. KM professionals are also attempting to build scientific-industrial networks so that they can manufacture and sell KM commodities, both in Korea and in foreign countries. The hybrid, fluid nature of KM enables these professionals to extend its reach and global influence, yet this process—the globalization of KM—also requires that KM participate in the global hegemony of science and the pharmaceutical industry. The contradictions inherent in this scenario give rise to uneven negotiations and conflicts at the local, national, and global levels. This paper considers these powerscapes—multiple and changing power relations—and their impact on KM’s globalization activities.
The Politics of the Family Law Reform Movement in Contemporary Korea: A Contentious Space for Gender and the Nation
Authors: Shin Ki-young
Published: April 2011

This paper examines the politics of family law reform in Korea up to the 2005 revision, when the family head system was abolished. Why did it take so long to abolish the gender hierarchy of Korea’s family law, and what made the family head system so entrenched? Moreover, how was the family head system finally abolished, in 2005, after a long history of conservative obstruction? This paper demonstrates that there have been multiple and conflicting views on gender equality in family, presented by three major actors: conservatives, the Korean state, and women’s groups. Each vigorously defended its view of how gender relations in the family should figure into the construction of the Korean nation. Conservatives attempted to reify gender hierarchy in the family as a core value of the Korean culture, and therefore argued to preserve it. Women’s groups envisioned gender equality as intrinsic to genuine democracy, which could not be achieved if the old family law were preserved. This paper argues that the revisions to the family law were the outcome of changing political relations among these three critical stakeholders. These relations were reflected by changes in the dominant discourse on the social functions of family law at each revision, from a carrier of tradition in the early postcolonial period, to a transmitter of economic development in the 1970s, and finally into a catalyst for democracy in the late 1980s and afterward. The growing political influence of women’s groups in the 1990s and their close relationship with the Korean government and “progressive” social groups finally brought about the abolition of the entrenched gender hierarchy in family law.
Nation Rebuilding and Postwar South Korean Cinema: The Coachman and The Stray Bullet
Authors: Jeong Kelly
Published: April 2011

This paper examines two remarkable films from the Golden Age of South Korean cinema (1955–1972) against the larger sociocultural backdrop of postwar South Korea. The films Mabu (The Coachman, Kang Taejin, director 1961) and Obalt’an (The Stray Bullet, Yu Hyônmok, director 1961) came out at a crucial historical moment for South Korea ’s nation rebuilding and postwar industrialization efforts, and reveal much about Korea’s nationhood, its masculine character, and its responses to postwar chaos and Americas quasi-colonial presence. Through their reaffirmation of patriarchy, construction of a modern masculine national subject, and vilification of women, who are visually and otherwise associated with modernity and Westernization, the films offer insight into postwar Korean life and values—and betray Korea’s deeply ambiguous feelings toward modernity. Hence this paper seeks to illustrate the connection between popular movies and the government ideology of this period, and more specifically, how the issues of family, masculinity, and modernity are connected to the nation rebuilding project that the South Korean state proposed during the early 1960s.
Is the Samguk yusa Reliable? Case Studies from Chinese and Korean Sources
Authors: McBride Richard D.
Published: April 2011

This study evaluates the problematic notion of “reliability” with respect to Iryŏn’s (1206–1289) Samguk yusa (Memorabilia of the Three Kingdoms) and seeks to describe the extent to which this work is dependable as a vehicle for preserving anecdotes, legends, and lore from Korean antiquity. The Samguk yusa was not compiled for the purpose of preserving data to answer the types of questions modern historians ask; therefore, its validity and utility should not be judged by criteria it was never designed to fulfill. However, the extent to which it reliably reproduces the language of its sources can and should be measured to the extent that it is possible. This study examines four examples of Iryŏn’s borrowing from preexisting Chinese and Korean sources—by providing full translations and textual analysis—and demonstrates that the Samguk yusa, for the most part, reliably reproduces the language of its original sources. Although a strong editorial hand is visible, either that of Iryŏn or of a later individual, the evidence suggests that Iryŏn is consistent when citing preexisting sources and that Iryŏn’s editorial techniques conform to those practiced by his Chinese colleagues.
The Making of the North Korean State
Authors: Kim Gwang-Oon
Published: April 2011

North Korea’s official history emphasizes the indigenousness and autonomy of the North’s state formation process. Meanwhile, scholars from outside present the North as a satellite or a puppet. This article takes the middle ground and argues that the North’s regime formation is best understood as the outcome of the interactions between Kim Il Sung (Kim Ilsŏng)–led communists and the Soviet occupation forces. The North Korean government of the mid- to late-1950s criticized Soviet interference as “modern revisionism” and set a principle of “let’s do things our way.” The Soviet Union criticized the North Korean measures as “anti-Soviet” and as “promotion of nationalism, ” but the North Korean government was finding its own ideology, theory, and methods. North Korea decided to “not live today for today, but to live today for tomorrow. ” North Korea also diverged significantly from the USSR and China, especially in its party structure and its leadership system. As a result, North Korea developed a unique system, different from those of other Eastern European socialist states. The historical process of the North’s state formation sheds light on why it did not collapse with Eastern European communist states or the Soviet Union.
The Suryŏng System as the Institution of Collectivist Development
Authors: Chung Young Chul
Published: April 2011

This article explains North Korea’s political framework as centered on suryŏng (supreme leader), in terms of domestic debates about the best developmental strategy to achieve the dual (and often contradictory) goals of building a “socialist utopia" and achieving economic development. In pursuit of these goals, the Korean Workers’ Party (KWP) has adopted a collectivist developmental strategy that places a premium on collective efforts and nonmaterial incentives. Several problems arose in the process of implementation, and the challenges of de-Stalinization from outside, and dogmatism and individualism from within, were particularly serious. The KWP responded with political projects to solidify the party and strengthen its unity with the public while privileging ideological incentives over material rewards. The series of choices eventually led to the establishment of the suryŏng system, in which Kim Il Sung (Kim Ilsŏng) occupied the central position of power around which the party and mass were organized. In the 1990s, when the suryŏng system faced particularly difficult challenges, Kim Jong Il (Kim Chŏngil) sought to institutionalize the system further by adopting the military-first policy, which placed the military at the center of the efforts to diffuse the suryŏng system’s normative values throughout the society.
The Rise and Demise of Industrial Agriculture in North Korea
Authors: Yu Chong-Ae
Published: April 2011

Scholars conventionally suggest one of three causes for North Korea’s agricultural collapse in the mid-1990s: overall economic decline, deficiencies in the socialist collective system, or environmental disaster. In contrast to these explanations, each of which characterizes the North Korean agricultural collapse as an idiosyncratic failure, this article shows that this crisis can be attributed to the unsustainable nature of modern industrial agriculture, which has been rooted in a thoroughgoing implementation of the worldwide modernization project of the past century. From its outset, North Korea’s industrial agricultural production growth was predicated on the high consumption of petroleum used to produce agricultural chemicals and provide energy for mechanization and irrigation. While North Korea achieved substantial agricultural success during the first three decades of its industrialization, its methods produced an unsustainable level of physical and environmental externalities. The subsequent decline of the Soviet Union meant that North Korea’s need for synthetic agro-inputs could no longer be met, a state of affairs that led to the collapse of the 1990s. This analysis shows that the uniqueness of North Korea’s agricultural collapse lies not in the industrial agricultural methods used, but rather in their extremity. With a variety of analyses that indicate declining oil production in a context of increasing demand for petroleum energy, the North Korean case has implications for agriculture that extend well beyond the Korean peninsula.
Famine Relief, Social Order, and State Performance in Late Chosŏn Korea
Authors: Karlsson Anders
Published: April 2011

Despite increased agricultural output, famine was a growing problem in late Chosŏn Korea, in terms of both frequency and scale. The Chosŏn state developed an elaborate system of tax exemptions and relief aid to deal with crop failure and famine. It is often argued, however, that state administration deteriorated in the nineteenth century due to neglect under the influence of so-called in-law politics. Based on an analysis of early nineteenth-century relief aid guidelines and relief grain procurement practices, this article argues that the deteriorating effects of in-law politics have been exaggerated. In fact, that state’s famine relief policies successfully and simultaneously addressed the two difficult tasks of helping a countryside increasingly afflicted by famine and of reproducing the existing social order in order to secure the state’s stability. The Chosŏn state carried out both of these tasks within the constraints of general fiscal difficulties.
Peripheral Influence: The Sinǔiju Student Incident of 1945 and the Impact of Soviet Occupation in North Korea
Authors: Cathcart Adam , Kraus Charles
Published: April 2011

This article examines the North Korean city of Sinǔiju during the era of Soviet occupation, focusing specifically on the Sinǔiju incident of 23 November 1945. A violent clash between local youth and Communist security forces, the incident revealed the combustible mixture of factors present in postcolonial North Korea. The Soviet military government’s deadly response to the protests seriously threatened Korea’s receptiveness to the Korean Communist Party and to the Soviet Union, and forced stronger control over both the city of Sinǔiju and youth nationwide. This article considers the visit that Kim Il Sung (Kim Ilsŏng) made to Sinǔiju in the aftermath of the incident, as well as subsequent North Korean policies in Sinǔiju. Drawing on previously untapped files from the Archive of Military History of the Russian Federation, newly declassified CIA documents, and Korean- and Chinese-language texts, this article examines a North Korean city whose peripheral influence in the postcolonial period has not yet been adequately understood.
Calls for Self-Sacrifice in North Korean Creative Writing in the Late 1900s to 2000s
Authors: Gabroussenko Tatiana
Published: April 2011

Struggling to postpone the “natural death” of Stalinism and prop up shaken public morale, the North Korean regime recently initiated a chain of new mobilization slogans focused on one core idea: the demand for self-sacrifice in the name of the leader/party/revolution. This article traces innovative features in the current edition of the self-sacrifice concept and investigates how important instruments of persuasion, such as North Korean creative writing, reinforce and translate this propagandistic pattern. The article includes analyses of the implications that the self-sacrifice message had for ordinary Koreans, and of the effectiveness of contemporary calls for self-sacrifice.
Pak Ch’anghwa and the Hwarang segi Manuscripts
Authors: McBride Richard D.
Published: April 2011

This study evaluates the authenticity of the Hwarang segi (The Generations of the Hwarang) manuscripts by placing them within the larger context of Pak Ch’anghwa’s other fictional writings on Silla. It also provides greater detail on Pak’s life, his scholarly interests, and his concerns about the lack of early literature preserving unalloyed the legends from Korea’s antiquity. Pak’s other manuscripts on Silla provide background on several terms and seminal ideas that were developed in the Hwarang segi. Because they show an evolution in the way Pak conceived of the hwarang and early Silla society, they cannot be ignored or set apart from the Hwarang segi manuscripts. In particular, this essay examines the origins and philosophy of the hwarang, the importance of matrilineal status, and the scholarship on the hyangga found in the Hwarang segi manuscripts. Scholars cannot ignore the other manuscripts and accept only the Hwarang segi as authentic. Rather, they provide strong evidence that Pak composed the Hwarang segi as historical fiction.
The Chinese Ancestors in a Korean Descent Group’s Genealogies
Authors: Robinson Kenneth R.
Published: April 2011

Korean genealogies are commonly read for information about individuals and lineages recorded therein. They may be read also for content, themes, and contrasts that inform the writing of the constructed ancestors. The T’aean Yi ssi descent group fared poorly in the higher civil service examinations throughout the Chosŏn period, but entered numerous members into government service through the technical specializations, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By contrast, the first generations—which the genealogy compiler(s) placed in China from the tenth century into the early twelfth century—not only excelled at the higher civil service examinations, but also married members of the imperial family and produced daughters or descendants of some of the most famous men in Northern Song history. The social status of the first generations and their political status in the genealogy added a stature that the descent group had not achieved in the Chosŏn period.
“Wise Mother, Good Wife”: A Transcultural Discursive Construct in Modern Korea
Authors: Choi Hyaeweol
Published: April 2011

The article investigates the genealogies of “wise mother and good wife,” arguably the most influential gender ideology in modern Korea. Approaching it as a product of transcultural encounters in turn of the twentieth-century Korea, the article examines the ways in which Korea’s Confucian-prescribed gender norms were refashioned and reconstituted under the influence of the ideology of domesticity promoted by American Protestant women missionaries and the Meiji gender ideology of ryōsai kenbo, which transpired through Japanese colonial policies in Korea. I argue that the modern construct of “wise mother and good wife” ideology was the latest form of patriarchal gender arrangements designed to meet new challenges in the modern era. I further argue that this modern ideal of womanhood was both oppressive and liberating in the sense that it continued hierarchical gender practices of the past, and yet it also enabled women to carve out new space for power and authority within the circumscribed conditions.
Kim Yujŏng’s “Thoughts from a Sickbed” and the Critique of Empiricist Discourse
Authors: Hanscom Christopher
Published: April 2011

This article examines canonical author Kim Yujŏng’s only sustained piece of literary-critical writing with an eye toward rethinking the genre conventions which structure our perceptions of colonial-period Korean literature. In his “Thoughts from a Sickbed,” a wide-ranging essay written in epistolary form and published in the month of his death in 1937, Kim grapples with what I call empiricist discourse in the areas of science, love, and aesthetics and presents a critique of subjectivism and objectivism in all three registers. Kim takes issue with a naïve belief in the capacity of language to fully capture its referent, a tendency he finds basic to both naturalist and “new psychological” fiction. He argues instead for a mode of writing that confronts such assumptions with the impossibility of complete representation, a continual grasping toward always unattainable ideals of human knowledge and understanding. This study frames Kim’s engagement with empiricist discourse in the context of the more general crisis of representation which crossed ideological boundaries in the Seoul literary circles of the 1930s and suggests that Kim’s critique—and subsequent advocacy of ethical literary practice—points toward irony and idealism as categories through which the relationship between discourse and reality in colonial-period literary history might be productively thought.
Widows’ Position and Agency in the Late Chosŏn Dynasty
Authors: Jung Ji-Young
Published: April 2011

This paper examines what gender norms were constructed while the patriarchal order based upon Neo-Confucianism gained strength in the latter part of Chosŏn period, and to what extent these norms were actualized in people’s lives. Through a microscopic analysis of the Tansŏng Hojŏk—the household registers of Tansŏng County, Kyŏngsang Province from 1678 to 1789—this article examines the changes in the ways in which heads of households were recorded, the changed position of widows in the household registers, and the state of residence and remarriage of widows. While it was common that widows were recorded as heads of the household in the seventeenth century, they tended to be recorded as mothers of their sons in the eighteenth century. This change of widows’ status in family registers was the product of state policy to reorganize the society according to chongbŏp chilsŏ. The change of household register system began to expand the idea of strict patrilineal succession to the lower strata of the society. However, it is difficult to conclude that chongbŏp chilsŏ became rooted in people’s everyday lives. The cases of the state of residence and remarriage of widows make it evident that they crisscrossed the boundary of the gender norms—as much as their social status and circumstances allowed—and made use of various life strategies.
The Politics of Condolence: Contested Representations of Tribute in Late Nineteenth-Century Chosŏn-Qing Relations
Authors: Van Lieu Joshua
Published: April 2011

After the death of the Chosŏn Queen Dowager Cho in 1890, a Qing mission arrived in Seoul to present the Guangxu emperor’s letter of condolence. In accordance with established precedent King Kojong greeted the envoys outside the city and publicly prostrated before the imperial missive. Western scholars have long understood this event as an illustration of Kojong’s willing submission to the Qing Empire and evidence of the persistence of “traditional” tributary relations into the modern era. The Chosŏn government, however, actively negotiated for months with Qing officials in an ultimately failed effort to cancel the mission. Chosŏn and Qing officials devoted such time and energy in debate not because they were especially concerned with maintaining ancient ritual forms but rather because they were acutely aware of the impact the public display of tributary ritual would have on Western interpretations of Qing claims to imperial dominion over Chosŏn. Despite continual Chosŏn resistance, Qing officials thus planned and executed the condolence mission as a propaganda exercise for Western consumption in order to secure recognition of Qing authority over Chosŏn. This Qing representation of the condolence mission and the tributary relationship in turn has come to inform decades of Western scholarship on late nineteenth-century Chosŏn-Qing relations.
An Outline History of Korean Historiography
Authors: Ch'oe Yŏng-ho
Published: April 2011

Korea has a long history of historiography.* There are many references to historical records kept during the Three Kingdoms period, but none of these records have survived, making it difficult for us to know the nature of historiography in ancient Korea. The oldest histories still extant are the Samguk sagi and the Samguk yusa , compiled during the Koryŏ dynasty. Although these two works are indispensable in understanding the history of the three ancient kingdoms, the former has been severely criticized by modern nationalist-minded historians for its alleged China-centered world view. During the Yi dynasty, officials and scholars were strongly conscious of their past and produced a number of official and private histories. Their historical sensibility, however, went beyond the realm of historiography—the fear that one's moral conduct might be found wanting by future generations often affected the behavior of kings and officials alike. This traditional Confucian historiography gave way to a modern form around the turn of the twentieth century. Japanese scholars were the first to use modern methods in studying Korean history. Although their studies provided many new insights, many of them were marred by the prejudice and bias often shown by the Japanese toward the Koreans. A group of Korean scholars of the "Nationalist School" gallantly attempted to challenge what they saw as distortions of Korean history by both Japanese and traditional Korean historians, but with little success. With the publication of Chindan hakpo in the 1930s, historiography in Korea entered a new era as there emerged a new breed of Korean scholars who were trained in modern historical craft. Although there are some significantly different trends in interpretation, historical studies in South and North Korea have evolved from the interpretations of these scholars.
The State of the Art in the Historical-Comparative Studies of Japanese and Korean
Authors: Sohn Ho-min
Published: April 2011

Encompassing most relevant works that have appeared to date, this article examines and evaluates as objectively as possible various old and new hypotheses regarding the genetic affiliation of Japanese and Korean. The first part of the article (sections 1-6) concerns the works that relate the two languages to Altaic or Austronesian, touching briefly on the Tamil substratum hypothesis at the end. It is observed that the Altaic hypothesis is the most persuasive in view of the data presently available. The second part (sections 7-8) reviews the works dealing with the relationship between Japanese and Korean. It appears undeniable that the two languages are genetically related sister languages. The article closes with some brief suggestions for future research.
The Korean Lawyer: A Study of Career Development
Authors: Won George Y. M. , Oh In-Hwan
Published: April 2011

This study, based on a sample of 134 lawyers in private practice in the Republic of Korea, examines the career profile of the modern Korean lawyer. Korean lawyers generally come from privileged backgrounds; the children of landlords and professionals comprised nearly two-thirds of our sample. The paucity of law firms in Korea has led young lawyers to enter government service for judicial experience before "retiring" to private practice. Consequently the youngest lawyers in private practice are in their thirties, while most are in their fifties. Korean lawyers recognize the need for specialization. However, the tradition of establishing one's position with the help of personal contacts and through judicial experience remains strong, and most of the lawyers in this study still accept cases of all types, even when they might be inclined to specialize. The lawyers in our study are generally quite satisfied with law as a career, presumably due to the high prestige accorded the legal profession and the nature of the work itself.
The Narrative Tense in the Korean Novel: A Speculative Observation
Authors: Kim Uch'ang
Published: April 2011

The present tense of verbs predominates in narrative passages in the modern Korean novel. This phenomenon cannot be dismissed as coincidental or explained on the basis of individual idiosyncrasies. It should be understood in the larger context of cultural and social change in Korea during the last century. The break-down of the old order has left the novelist with a highly fragmented sense of time and an awareness of constant change in life. He must describe human experience as best he can without the assistance of a more integrative temporal framework. If we look at the traditional narrative that existed before the advent of the novel, we note that it has its own way of integrating experience through rhetorical devices or on the basis of a mythic past. However, such devices cannot be used in a novel intended to portray contemporary life in a realistic way. A new sense of time must evolve from an endless succession of present moments and an overwhelming confusion of sense impressions. The novel will have matured when it has evolved this new sense of time.
The Philosophy of Life of Cho Pyŏnghwa
Authors: O'Rourke Kevin
Published: April 2011

The purpose of this article is to elucidate the philosophy underlying the poetic world of Cho Pyŏnghwa (born 1921). Cho Pyŏnghwa's view of life is based on the premise that life and death are one continuous process, and that time is unchanging and eternal. However, there is a conflict between time in the abstract and individual moments of real time. This conflict leads the poet to an over-whelming awareness of life as a transitory state. Accordingly, the poet is compelled to achieve detachment, the only rational attitude for a man to take in a transitory world. Again the transitory nature of human existence leads the poet to an awareness of primeval loneliness and emptiness. The poet's life is directed toward the achievement of greatness. The means to greatness is the development of one's creativity to the fullest, and for Cho Pyŏnghwa the vehicle of creativity is poetry. Through his poetry he strives to give all men the consolation, strength, and life energy they need. Thus poetry is both an ongoing dialogue between the poet and his fellowmen and at the same time the poet's personal mean to greatness. The relationship between the poet and his fellowman is fraught with constant conflict between freedom and the necessity for love of others. Through poetry, the poet attempts to transcend the restrictiveness and transitoriness of human love by raising it to the plane of art.