The third of this season’s free seminars at SOAS:
How does the rise of moral didactic literature fit into narratives of North Korean history?
Andre Schmid (University of Toronto)
Date: 16 November 2012
Time: 5:15 PM
Venue: Russell Square: College Buildings
Room: G50Abstract
How to be a good socialist subject? After the Korean War there was no easy answer to this question. This was not because there was no answer to it, but because newspapers, magazines, and books offered so many possible solutions. Among the diverse forms of writing seeking to provide guidance, moral didactic literature — how to behave on a public bus? how to be a good mother? How to speak properly? — held a special position. Even as this discourse on the good socialist subject remained constrained by the parameters of official party ideology, it also moved into new areas — the study of which, this paper suggests, opens fresh ways to study the state, ideology, and everyday life in the postwar reconstruction (1953-65) of the country that is so often called the most isolated and most exceptional of the twentieth century, North Korea.
(automatically generated) Read LKL’s review of this event here.