The Red Room: Stories of Trauma in Contemporary Korea

Paperback: $15.00
ISBN-13: 9780824833978
Published: August 2009
Hardback: $35.00
ISBN-13: 9780824833268
Published: August 2009

Additional Information

200 pages
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  • About the Book
  • Modern Korean fiction is to a large extent a literature of witness to the historic upheavals of twentieth-century Korea. Often inspired by their own experiences, contemporary writers continue to show us how individual Koreans have been traumatized by wartime violence—whether the uprooting of whole families from the ancestral home, life on the road as war refugees, or the violent deaths of loved ones.

    The Red Room brings together stories by three canonical Korean writers who examine trauma as a simple fact of life. In Pak Wan-so’s “In the Realm of the Buddha,” trauma manifests itself as an undigested lump inside the narrator, a mass needing to be purged before it consumes her. The protagonist of O Chong-hui’s “Spirit on the Wind” suffers from an incomprehensible wanderlust—the result of trauma that has escaped her conscious memory. In the title story by Im Ch’or-u, trauma is recycled from torturer to victim when a teacher is arbitrarily detained by unnamed officials. Western readers may find these stories bleak, even chilling, yet they offer restorative truths when viewed in light of the suffering experienced by all victims of war and political violence regardless of place and time.

  • About the Author(s)
    • Bruce Fulton, Translator

      Bruce Fulton is Young-Bin Min Chair in Korean Literature and Literary Translation, Department of Asian Studies, University of British Columbia.
    • Ju-Chan Fulton, Translator

      Ju-Chan Fulton is a translator of numerous volumes of modern Korean fiction.
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