A Korean Perspective on the Korean War and Its Literary Representations

To whom—or to what social forces—does the Korean War belong? War historians have answered this question differently, depending on whether they have focused more on the domestic or international reasons for why the Korean War took place. Whereas many Korean War novels and contemporary Korean Studies scholars tend to emphasize the central role of the Cold War in understanding the conflict, foregrounding in the process the status of the Korean people as victims, this talk brings into focus the dual role of Koreans both as helpless victims and as willing agents. In doing so, the talk introduces an argument from Richard E. Kim’s novel, The Martyred, from the speaker's recent monograph. The premise here is that certain ugly realities of the Korean War tend to get repressed in most Korean War novels. As a consequence, in order to “read back” or recover these effaced realities, one requires an alternative hermeneutics. This alternative hermeneutics involves the use of an interpretive method that pays attention to such rhetorical or narrative devices as omission, substitution, and displacement. Through an analysis of two episodes from Kim’s novel, this talk aims to recover certain unsavory realities of the Korean War toward which both Cold War historiography and many Korean War novels have willingly turned a blind eye. The talk concludes with a brief discussion on how the legacy of the Korean War as an integral part of the Cold War is still very much alive—in the form of the contemporary mass politics of South Korea.

Suk Koo Rhee is Professor of English, Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea. He currently teaches a class on Korean crime cinema at Emory University as a 2025 Fulbright visiting scholar. Since 2012, he has served as the managing editor of the peer-reviewed journal Situations: Cultural Studies in the Asian Context. His research areas include postcolonial literature and theory, division literature and Asian cinema. One of Rhee’s most recent publications is the book, The Korean War Novel: Rewriting History from the Civil War to the Post-Cold War (Edinburgh UP, 2024). His essays have been published in a number of journals including Journal of Asian Studies, International Journal of Children’s Literature, Canadian Journal of Film Studies and Genre. His four Korean monographs on postcolonial literature and theory received such major awards as the Best Monograph of the Year Award (2011, 2021) from the English Language and Literature Association of Korea and the Korean Ministry of Education Award (2022). He is appointed as the Underwood Distinguished Professor during the term of 2022 to 2024, a prestigious award given to a Yonsei faculty member who is internationally recognized for his or her research accomplishments.