Yi Hwang (1501–1570)—best known by his literary name, T’oegye—is one of the most eminent thinkers in the history of East Asian philosophy and religion. His Chasŏngnok (Record of self-reflection) is a superb Korean Neo-Confucian text: an eloquent collection of twenty-two scholarly letters and four essays written to his close disciples and junior colleagues. These were carefully selected by T’oegye himself after self-reflecting (chasŏng) on his practice of personal cultivation. The Chasŏngnok continuously guided T’oegye and inspired others on the true Confucian way (including leading Neo-Confucians in Tokugawa Japan) while it criticized Buddhism and Daoism. Its philosophical merit rivals T’oegye’s monumental Sŏnghak sipto (Ten diagrams on sage learning) and “Four-Seven Debate Letters”; however, as a testament of T’oegye’s character, scholarship, and teaching, the Chasŏngnok is of greater interest. The work engages with his holistic knowledge and experience of self-cultivation by articulating textual and historical material on various key doctrines and ideas. It is an inspiring practical guide that reveals the depth of T’oegye’s learning and spirituality. The present volume offers a fully annotated translation of the Chasŏngnok. Following a groundbreaking discussion of T’oegye’s life and ideas according to the Chasŏngnok and his other major writings, it presents the core of his thought in six interrelated sections: “Philosophy of Principle,” “Human Nature and Emotions,” “Against Buddhism and Daoism,” “True Learning,” “Self-Cultivation,” and “Reverence and Spiritual Cultivation.” The bibliography offers a current catalogue of primary sources and modern works in Korean, Chinese, Japanese, and English. As the first comprehensive study of the Chasŏngnok, this book is a welcome addition to current literature on Korean classics and East Asian philosophy and religion. By presenting T’oegye’s thought-provoking contributions, it sheds new light on the vitality of Confucian wisdom, thereby affording scholars and students with an excellent primary source for East Asian studies in general and Confucian studies in particular.
Yi Hwang (1501-1570), better known by his pen name T'oegye, is generally considered Korea's preeminent Neo-Confucian scholar. The Ten Diagrams on Sage Learning is his final masterpiece, a distillation of the learning and practice of a lifetime, and one of the most important works of Korean Neo-Confucianism. In it he crystallized the essence of Neo-Confucian philosophy and spiritual practice in ten brief chapters that begin with the grand vision of the universe and conclude with a description of a well-lived day. In To Become a Sage, Michael Kalton supplements a superb translation of this pivotal text with useful commentary that will greatly enhance its value and interest to the lay reader. The Ten Diagrams is the first complete primary text of Korean Neo-Confucianism to be translated into English. Korea's Yi Dynasty (1392-1910), the only East Asian regime founded exclusively under Neo-Confucian auspices, was unique in its allegiance to the orthodox Ch'eng Chu school, predominant in China, Korea, and Japan. Although the Ten Diagrams is a relatively short work, it fully presents the entire vision of Neo-Confucianism as framed in that school. Kalton provides a brief history of Neo-Confucianism in China and Korea as well as commentary that includes extensive passages from T'oegye's voluminous personal correspondence. These annotations expand the meaning distilled in each chapter. They help the uninitiated reader understand the basic elements of the complex Ch'eng Chu school of Neo-Confucianism, while enabling the scholar to distinguish characteristic aspects of Korean Neo-Confucianism as presented in the thought of the nation's leading philosopher of the time.
Political prisoner Hyun Woo is freed after eighteen years to find no trace of the world he knew. The friends with whom he shared utopianist dreams are gone. His Seoul is unrecognizably transformed and aggressively modernized. Yoon Hee, the woman he loved, died three years ago. A broken man, he drifts toward a small house in Kalmoe, where he and Yoon Hee once stole a few fleeting months of happiness while fleeing the authorities. In the company of her diaries, he relives and reviews his life, trying to find meaning in the revolutionary struggle that consumed their youth—a youth of great energy and optimism, victim to implacable history. Hyun Woo weighs the worth of his own life, spent in prison, and that of the strong-willed artist Yoon Hee, whose involvement in rebel groups took her to Berlin and the fall of the wall. With great poignancy, Hwang Sok-yong grapples with the immortal questions—the endurance of love, the price of a commitment to causes—while depicting a generation that sacrificed youth, liberty, and often life, for the dream of a better tomorrow.
A wide-ranging collection of concise essays, Past Forward introduces core features of Korean history that illuminate current issues and pressing concerns, including recent political upheavals, social developments and cultural shifts. Adapted from Kyung Moon Hwang’s regular columns in the Korea Times of Seoul, the essays present interpretative points concerning historical debates and controversies to generate thinking about the ongoing impact of the past on the present and vice versa: how Korea’s present circumstances reflect and shape the evolving understanding of its past. In taking the reader on a compelling journey through history, Past Forward paints a distinctive, fascinating portrait of Korea and Koreans both yesterday and today.
Based on actual events, The Guest is a profound portrait of a divided people haunted by a painful past, and a generation's search for reconciliation. During the Korean War, Hwanghae Province in North Korea was the setting of a gruesome fifty-two day massacre. In an act of collective amnesia the atrocities were attributed to American military, but in truth they resulted from malicious battling between Christian and Communist Koreans. Forty years later, Ryu Yosop, a minister living in America returns to his home village, where his older brother once played a notorious role in the bloodshed. Besieged by vivid memories and visited by the troubled spirits of the deceased, Yosop must face the survivors of the tragedy and lay his brother's soul to rest. Faulkner-like in its intense interweaving narratives, The Guest is a daring and ambitious novel from a major figure in world literature.
The first book to explore the institutional, ideological, and conceptual development of the modern state on the peninsula, Rationalizing Korea analyzes the state’s relationship to five social sectors, each through a distinctive interpretive theme: economy (developmentalism), religion (secularization), education (public schooling), population (registration), and public health (disease control). Kyung Moon Hwang argues that while this formative process resulted in a more commanding and systematic state, it was also highly fragmented, socially embedded, and driven by competing, often conflicting rationalizations, including those of Confucian statecraft and legitimation. Such outcomes reflected the acute experience of imperialism, nationalism, colonialism, and other sweeping forces of the era.
The social structure of contemporary Korea contains strong echoes of the hierarchical principles and patterns governing stratification in the Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1910): namely, birth and one’s position in the bureaucracy. At the beginning of Korea’s modern era, the bureaucracy continued to exert great influence, but developments undermined, instead of reinforced, aristocratic dominance. Furthermore, these changes elevated the secondary status groups of the Chosŏn dynasty, those who had belonged to hereditary, endogamous tiers of government and society between the aristocracy and the commoners: specialists in foreign languages, law, medicine, and accounting; the clerks who ran local administrative districts; the children and descendants of concubines; the local elites of the northern provinces; and military officials. These groups had languished in subordinate positions in both the bureaucratic and social hierarchies for hundreds of years under an ethos and organization that, based predominantly on family lineage, consigned them to a permanent place below the Chosŏn aristocracy. As the author shows, the political disruptions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, rewarded talent instead of birth. In turn, these groups’ newfound standing as part of the governing elite allowed them to break into, and often dominate, the cultural, literary, and artistic spheres as well as politics, education, and business.
This book discusses perceptions of ‘femininity’ in contemporary South Korea and the extent to which fictional representations in South Korean women’s fiction of the 1990s challenges the enduring association of the feminine with domesticity, docility and passivity. While existing literature addresses Korean women’s legal, educational, political and employment issues, this study is the first to analyse the cultural values that define femininity in the context of the Korean cultural imagination, concentrating on literary representations of femininity.
Dynamic and meticulously researched, A History of Korea continues to be one of the leading introductory textbooks on Korean history. Assuming no prior knowledge, Hwang guides readers from early state formation and the dynastic eras to the modern experience in both North and South Korea. Structured around episodic accounts, each chapter begins by discussing a defining moment in Korean history in context, with an extensive examination of how the events and themes under consideration have been viewed up to the present day. By engaging with recurring themes such as collective identity, external influence, social hierarchy, family and gender, the author introduces the major historical events, patterns and debates that have shaped both North and South Korea over the past 1500 years. This textbook is essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students of Korean or Asian history. The first half of the book covers pre-20th century history, and the second half the modern era, making it ideal for survey courses.
Living peace includes both a collection of Korean Zen poems by contemporary Zen master Kyunghoon Sunim (Park, Kyunghoon), as well as commentary by Zen mouk, Hyedang Sunim (Whang, Seungwoo). The volume contains sixty poems and sixty short interpretative essays. Together these writings offer the reader samples of contemporary Korean poetry and valuable insight into the Korean form of Zen Praddhism.
THE STORY: CHINGLISH is a hilarious comedy about the challenges of doing business in a country whose language--and underlying cultural assumptions--can be worlds apart from those of the West. The play tells the adventures of Daniel, an American busin
These captivating short stories portray three major periods in modern Korean history: the forces of colonial modernity during the late 1930s; the postcolonial struggle to rebuild society after four decades of oppression, emasculation, and cultural exile (1945 to 1950); and the attempt to reconstruct a shattered land and a traumatized nation after the Korean War. Lost Souls echoes the exceptional work of China's Shen Congwen and Japan's Kawabata Yasunari. Modernist narratives set in the metropolises of Tokyo and Pyongyang alternate with starkly realistic portraits of rural life. Surrealist tales suggest the unsettling sensation of colonial domination, while stories of the outcast embody the thrill and terror of independence and survival in a land dominated by tradition and devastated by war. Written during the chaos of 1945, "Booze" recounts a fight between Koreans for control of a former Japanese-owned distillery. "Toad" relates the suffering created by hundreds of thousands of returning refugees, and stories from the 1950s confront the catastrophes of the Korean War and the problematic desire for autonomy. Visceral and versatile, Lost Souls is a classic work on the possibilities of transition that showcases the innovation and craftsmanship of a consummate and widely celebrated storyteller.
Hwang Sun-won, perhaps the most beloved and respected Korean writer of the 20th century, based this extraordinary novel on his own experiences in his North Korean home village between the end of World War II and the eve of the Korean War when Korea had been divided into North and South by its two "liberators" - the United States and the Soviet Union. In this story the Soviet-backed communist party, using the promise of land reform, sets people at each other's throat. Portrayed here is an entire community caught in the political and social firestorm that brings out the selfishness, cruelty and ignorance of simple people, but also shows their loyalty and nobility. Compelling here, too, is a heroine who represents the "eternally feminine" for all Korean men, and the setting, the harsh political, psychic and physical landscape of rural postwar North Korea rarely glimpsed by the outside world. Hwang Sun-won is an artist of consummate delicacy and subtlety, and his writing is marked by keen psychological insight and steely asceticism. While three collections of his short stories have appeared in Hong Kong and the West, "The Descendants of Cain" is the first English translation of a Hwang Sun-won novel.
This open access book examines the depiction of Korean history in recent South Korean historical films. Released over the Hallyu (“Korean Wave”) period starting in the mid-1990s, these films have reflected, shaped, and extended the thriving public discourse over national history. In these works, the balance between fate and freedom—the negotiation between societal constraints and individual will, as well as cyclical and linear history—functions as a central theme, subtext, or plot device for illuminating a rich variety of historical events, figures, and issues. In sum, these highly accomplished films set in Korea’s past address universal concerns about the relationship between structure and agency, whether in collective identity or in individual lives. Written in an engaging and accessible style by an established historian, Fate and Freedom in Korean Historical Films offers a distinctive perspective on understanding and appreciating Korean history and culture.
The rise of the economic power of the ethnic Chinese, known also as overseas Chinese, Chinese overseas or Chinese diaspora, was a late 20th century phenomenon. It was partly the result of the rise of the Four Little Asian Dragons in the 1970s, and was speeded up by the tempo of globalization towards the end of that century. This book explores the ethnic identity and boundary of the Chinese as minority groups in foreign lands, and as sub-groups among the Chinese themselves. It examines prominent personalities that had wielded considerable influence in the ethnic Chinese communities in the economic, social and educational arenas. It also discusses the type of politics that had impacted their relationship with their mother country — China.Containing 16 papers presented at various international conferences in Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, China and Taiwan as keynote speeches and research findings which are predominantly unpublished in English, this book provides fresh perspectives and re-interpretations on the issues of ethnicity, leadership and politics in the ethnic Chinese worlds.
This unique volume provides a broad introduction to the ethnic Chinese business in Asia, with focus on the ethnic Chinese in East and Southeast Asia. The growing interest in ethnic Chinese business reflects its importance in these two regional economies, and its relations with China's economy — the world's new economic powerhouse. It examines the nature and characteristics of the ethnic Chinese business, such as business networks, family business and conglomerates, concepts of xinyong and guanxi, and entrepreneurship and management. It also examines the input of history and culture in the formation and operation of ethnic Chinese business. The second half of the book is devoted to detailed regional studies, covering the Chinese in Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, Hong Kong and Taiwan. This book provides an excellent introduction for tertiary students in business schools, and for prospective businessmen who wish to do business with the Chinese in East and Southeast Asia.
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