koreanlit1-7, Exercise 3: The Square and the North

Model answer:

The Square (1960): the page describes it in one sentence as following a Korean prisoner of war whose life is troubled and who dies by suicide amid an intensified ideological rift in the post-war era. It says the novel "immediately became successful", was published right after the April 1960 Student Revolution, and was "the starting point for a new era in Korea's modern literature"; translated by Kevin O'Rourke (Spindlewood, 1985). Left out: the protagonist's name, the setting, his choices and any revision history.

North Korean literature (Wikipedia, North Korean literature): output is shaped and controlled by the state, with only members of the Korean Writers' Alliance allowed to publish and works needing to praise the Workers' Party; it is "almost always characterized as socialist realism"; after the mid-1950s Kim Il Sung denounced "foreign" elements.

Reasons for care: (1) the article is tagged as possibly containing dated statements (from 2020); (2) much of the material comes from individual sources such as a defector, and some references are weak; also, the critique of socialist realism is a minority view in Western scholarship. This is one open source and I have not checked it elsewhere.