The postwar Korean literatures and films that we have been discussing
and will discuss in next week link the cultural symptoms of urban life
to historical trauma of the Korean War. Choose TWO texts from the list
and write a comparative essay based on the questions given as below.

·Kim Su-yong’s “Mist” or Kim Seung-Ok’s “Journey to Mujin” : Choose one
from either a story or a film if you like to select this narrative.

·Yi Seung-Ku’s The General’s Mustache

·Pak Wan-so’s “In the Realm of Buddha”

·Im Chul-woo’s “The Red Room”

·Chong-hui’s “Spirit on the Wind”

1.How is the Korean War remembered? What is at stake in the way of
forgetting and remembering the traumatic past?

2.In what way the texts address the problem of the postwar process of
modernization in juxtaposition with the past memories?

3.How does the work of mourning or melancholia (which are two ways of
dealing with the loss) affect the characters’ environment such as
landscape and the interior space?

4.What kind of cinematic or literary languages are utilized in order to
deal with the traumatic history and painful memory?

5.What is the significance of gender, generation, and ideology in these
works? How is the violence of trauma perceived or overcome differently
according to the characters’ gender, generation, and ideology?