Capstone

Nine chapters, from songs in a borrowed script to a Nobel Prize. This chapter adds no new facts. It follows five questions that kept coming back in different forms and shows how the chapters answer them. The title is a suggestion for a way of reading and not a claim from any source: the periods can be read as answering one another.

The Threads, Chapter by Chapter

Thread One: Which Language, Which Script?

Korean Literature 1 gave the article's line that "For much of Korea's 1,500 years of literary history, it was written in Hanja". Korean Literature 2 and 3 followed the adaptations: hyangchal and idu used Chinese characters to spell Korean, and the 1446 Hunminjeongeum introduced the alphabet whose first major work, Yongbi eocheonga (1447), was a court poem. The question comes back in the twentieth century in a different form: Korean Literature 6 noted that much of Yi Sang's early poetry was in Japanese, and Korean Literature 7 that Hwang Sun-won was noted for refusing to write in Japanese, particularly early in his career. In Korean Literature 9 it is the English that matters, and a translator's voice. My reading, not stated in the sources: in every period, the question "in what script, in what language?" decided who could write and who could be read.

Thread Two: Control and Dissent

The sources record control and the response to it more often than they describe it. Korean Literature 6 gave Yi Gwangsu's collaboration after 1937 and Yun Dong-ju's death in Fukuoka Prison; Korean Literature 7 gave a short, factual note on North Korean literature as state-controlled; Korean Literature 8 gave Kim Chi-ha's 1974 death sentence for a poem the article says "says nothing about either communism or North Korea", and Hwang Sok-yong's prison term and pardon in 1998. The sources do not describe the censorship systems themselves, and the course did not read about them.

Thread Three: Division and War

The division is a subject from Korean Literature 7 on: Hwang Sun-won's "Cranes", about friends on opposite sides, and The Square, whose source gave only a sentence. The survey article's phrase "wounds and chaos of war and tragedy" is the only general statement the course has. Korean Literature 8 added Park Wan-suh's war-separated family and Hwang Sok-yong's Vietnam service and The Guest, and Korean Literature 8's Gwangju figures, which no source settles. The Dangun dating in Korean Literature 2 (2333 BCE in South Korea's old Dangi era, an early thirtieth century BCE in North Korea) shows the division reaching back to the myths.

Thread Four: Class and Gender

Class and gender are in the stories from the start. Korean Literature 4 named gisaeng poets and the shift in gasa from yangban to commoner writers; Korean Literature 5 gave Hong Gildong, an illegitimate son denied full status, and Chunhyang, a gisaeng's daughter; Korean Literature 8 gave The Dwarf and Park Wan-suh's turn, from the 1980s, to "problems afflicting women in patriarchal society"; Korean Literature 9 ended with Kim Ji-young, Born 1982 and its reception. My reading: the same two questions, who is allowed full status and who is believed, run from Hong Gildong to a 2016 novel, but the sources do not say so.

Thread Five: Who Gets Heard?

Only 25 hyangga survive (Korean Literature 2), only a handful of Hwang Jini's sijo (Korean Literature 4), and early Korean translations of Yi Sang were "loose and inconsistent" (Korean Literature 6). In the present, translated books pass through prizes and a state-funded institute (Korean Literature 1 and 9). The pattern is that what survives or is translated is a selection, and the sources do not say what was left out.

Open Questions

• Who learned Hangul, and when? Korean Literature 3 asked this and no article read answered it.
• Who wrote Hong Gildong? The article says the question is open (Korean Literature 5).
• How should a writer's later choices be judged? The sources report Yi Gwangsu's collaboration and Kim Sowol's or Han Yong-un's readings without a verdict (Korean Literature 6).
• How many died at Gwangju? "No universally accepted death toll" (Korean Literature 8).
• What of Korean literature is not in English? No article gives a count (Korean Literature 9).
• Were the dates right? The articles disagreed on the Samguk sagi and Samguk yusa, on a prize year and on The Old Garden.

A Reading Path (Mine, Unchecked)

These are works the course named together with an English translation one of its articles lists. I did not check availability or editions.

• Choe Inhun, The Square (translated by Kevin O'Rourke, 1985).
• Cho Se-hui, The Dwarf (translated by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton, University of Hawaii Press, 2006).
• Shin Kyung-sook, Please Look After Mom (translated by Chi-Young Kim, 2011).
• Han Kang, The Vegetarian and Human Acts (translated by Deborah Smith).
• Bora Chung, Cursed Bunny (translated by Anton Hur, 2022).
• Hwang Sun-won, Trees on a Slope (English edition listed as 2005).

What This Course Left Out

It left out most poetry after 1945, drama, children's literature, essays, literary magazines, women writers of the colonial period, the censorship systems, Korean writing abroad, genre fiction and webtoons and web novels (which have their own course plan), and all primary texts: I read no poem or story, and quote none. North Korean literature appears only as one short note. Many writers named in the articles but not read here (Kim Hyesoon, Ko Un, Yi Mun-yol, Hwang Jungeun and others) are good starts for a second course.

Exercises

Where next: this completes Korean Literature. The planned Korea courses on history, K-pop, webtoons, taekwondo and festivals can follow the same method, and a second literature course could take the writers and forms listed above.