31 research outputs found
Teaching English to North Korean Refugees at Banseok School in South Korea: An Interview with Amanda DeCesaro
Get PDFThis interview addresses teaching English as a foreign language (EFL) to young-adult North Korean refugees at Banseok School (Pansŏk Hakkyo) in Seoul. A Christian institution supported by Sarang Church (Sarang ŭi Kyohoe), the school offers education, mentorship, and volunteer services in preparation for university admission in South Korea and for the anticipated reunification of the two Koreas. Amanda DeCesaro discusses her volunteer conversation class and methods, student learning needs and social hierarchies, emotions in the language classroom, attitudes toward English, interactions with other learners, and how educators should knowledgeably and compassionately engage North Korean refugee students. The interview was conducted electronically by Alzo David-West
Savage Nature and Noble Spirit in Han Sorya's Wolves: A North Korean Morality Tale
Get PDFPeer reviewed article. This paper is a narratological study of Han Sorya's Wolves, a canonical novelette in the tradition of North Korean socialist realism that has been adjudicated outside North Korea as anti-American, anti-Christian, and extremely racist. The novelette, however, is a more metaphorical, hybrid, and complicated piece of writing than has previously been assumed. Descriptive and interpretative narratological analysis reveals that Wolves is a patriotic-proletarian morality tale against colonialism, imperialism, racism, and war. The story also reveals grand metaphysical and normative Neo-Confucian imperatives, which operate as moral shaping principles that are interwoven into character, plot, and theme
An Inquiry of Intentions in Kim Hye-yong's 'First Meeting': A North Korean Short Story in Korea Today (2007).
Get PDFThis paper examines the problem of the intentional fallacy in the North Korean short story 'First Meeting' by Kim Hye-yong. Serially published in Korea Today in 2007, the nationalist allegory centres on Shin Ch'ong-mi, a young female journalist in Pyongyang, who falls in love with her penfriend Song-u, a soldier in the Korean People's Army, and struggles to remain devoted to him when he suddenly stops writing. With the literary-critical method of counterintuitive reading, the inquiry analyses the structural relations of the narrative, its discourse on desire, its apparent intentions, and its contravening elements, revealing an incidental unstable narrative that is symbolically protesting of the moral of the story to affectionately embrace the political authority of the North Korean party-army regime in the military-first (songun) era
Marxism, Stalinism, and the Juche Speech of 1955: On the Theoretical De-Stalinization of North Korea
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