Koolaids: The Art of War

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Macmillan, Jul 9, 1999 - Fiction - 256 pages

The contentious relationship between modernism and realism has powerfully influenced literary history throughout the twentieth century and into the present. In 1930s Korea, at a formative moment in these debates, a âeoecrisis of representationâe stemming from the loss of faith in language as a vehicle of meaningful reference to the world became a central concern of literary modernists as they operated under Japanese colonial rule.

Christopher P. Hanscom examines the critical and literary production of three prose authors central to 1930s literary circlesâe"Pak Tâe(tm)aewon, Kim Yujong, and Yi Tâe(tm)aejunâe"whose works confront this crisis by critiquing the concept of transparent or âeoeempiricistâe language that formed the basis for both a nationalist literary movement and the legitimizing discourse of assimilatory colonization. Bridging literary and colonial studies, this re-reading of modernist fiction within the imperial context illuminates links between literary practice and colonial discourse and questions anew the relationship between aesthetics and politics.

The Real Modern challenges Eurocentric and nativist perspectives on the derivative particularity of non-Western literatures, opens global modernist studies to the similarities and differences of the colonial Korean case, and argues for decolonization of the ways in which non-Western literatures are read in both local and global contexts.

 

Selected pages

Contents

Section 1
3
Section 2
5
Section 3
7
Section 4
12
Section 5
17
Section 6
34
Section 7
41
Section 8
43
Section 15
126
Section 16
144
Section 17
166
Section 18
167
Section 19
172
Section 20
184
Section 21
184
Section 22
185

Section 9
44
Section 10
53
Section 11
95
Section 12
98
Section 13
113
Section 14
123
Section 23
188
Section 24
190
Section 25
221
Section 26
225
Section 27
254
Copyright

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About the author (1999)

Rabih Almeddine is a successful painter who has had gallery shows throughout the United States, Europe and the Middle East. He lives is San Francisco. He is also the author of "The Perv."

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