Science fiction narratives appeared in the North Korean children's magazine Adong munhak between 1956 and 1965, and they bear witness to the significant Soviet influence in this formative period of the DPRK. Moving beyond questions of authenticity and imitation, however, this article locates the science fiction narrative within North Korean discourses on children's literature preoccupied with the role of fiction as both a reflection of the real and a projection of the imminent, utopian future. Through a close reading of science fiction narratives from this period, this article underscores the way in which science, technology, and the environment are implicated in North Korean political discourses of development, and points to the way in which these works resolve the inherent tension between the desirable and seemingly contradictory qualities of the ideal scientist—obedient servant of the collective and indefatigable questioner—to establish the child-scientist as the new protagonist of the DPRK.
This book is the story of the emergence and development of writing for children in modern Korea. In the 1920s, a narrator-adult voice began to speak for the first time directly to a child-reader whose mind was deemed knowable and moldable. Writers and educators saw the qualities of this unique child audience manifest in a new concept called the child-heart, or tongsim. This book examines children’s literature at the moment the child emerged as a powerful metaphor of Korea’s future, through the colonization of Korea, and up until the ideological entrenchment that intensified in the post-liberation period. By reading children’s periodicals against the political, educational, and psychological discourses of their time, this book argues that the child-heart concept was particularly productive for the project of modernity and nation-building, as well as for the colonial and postcolonial projects of socialization and nationalization, because it posited the child in a symbiotic relationship with the natural world that allowed for explorations of the meaning of culture and nature at a time when culture and nature were deeply contested. This book reveals a trajectory of Korean children’s prose and poetry that begins with depictions of the child as an organic part of nature and ends with the child as the agent of the control of nature. Ultimately, the book reveals the complex ways the figure of the child became a driving force of nostalgia that stood in for future aspirations for the individual, family, class, and nation.
The Korean War (1950–3) was one of the most traumatic events in the history of the Korean peninsula. Known commonly as the ‘Forgotten War’, it is explained as a civil war that was exacerbated by the Soviet Union and the United States into an arena for the Cold War. Since then, North and South Korea have had to construct their national identities in accordance with the political ideologies that defined them. Consequently, each has told their national birth story – the story of division and war – in historical narratives for children. While a strict anti-communist ideology muted personal experiences of the war that might diverge from the anti-communist rhetoric of the immediate post-war period, contemporary children's literature reveals that the authority that the myth of innocence maintains in children's fiction firmly places the child protagonists in a position to pose tough questions about the nature of the conflict. Hegemonic Korean War narratives are challenged in contemporary fiction through ‘truth-telling’ uses of realism and folktales; at the same time, this paper questions the extent to which contemporary fiction presents its young audience with freedom of interpretation, and asks what implications it has for the relief of trauma.
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