Breaking Boundaries in Literature : The Nobel Prize and Korea’s Untold Stories


Book Description

"Breaking Boundaries in Literature: The Nobel Prize and Korea's Untold Stories" is a journey that transcends the familiar boundaries of literary critique. In this bold narrative, I delve into the heart of a question that has long troubled me: why does a prestigious award like the Nobel Prize often recognize works that fail to capture the full spectrum of the human experience, let alone the complex cultural sentiments of nations like Korea? At first glance, it may seem as though this is a book about literary criticism—a questioning of how one-sided perspectives come to dominate global recognition. But at its core, this work is much more than a critique of literary bias. It is an exploration of the multiverse itself, a challenge to the idea that the Nobel Prize, or any human-made institution, can truly grasp the depth of experience that exists beyond anthropocentric narratives. In a world defined by quantum uncertainty and the principles of relativity, why do we still cling to the notion that a singular "truth" or "universal" story can represent all of us? I ask this as someone who has spent years observing the increasing polarization in literature—where binary thinking, political ideologies, and human-centered concerns dominate. But the natural world, the cosmos in which we exist, operates on principles far beyond our limited comprehension. Could it be that in seeking to capture a singular "universal human experience," we are ignoring the more profound and chaotic truths that surround us? As you read this book, I invite you to consider a new perspective: one where the significance of a literary work is not measured by its political or social resonance, but by its ability to reflect the chaos, the order, and the vastness of the natural world. The Nobel Prize, once a symbol of human accomplishment, may have lost its way by focusing too narrowly on human ideologies. In doing so, it misses the greater, more profound narrative that unfolds in the universe—one that includes but is not confined to the human condition. Ultimately, "Breaking Boundaries in Literature" asks more questions than it answers, and that is precisely the point. The story of Korea—its division, its pain, its resilience—is not one that can be told from a single perspective, nor can it be understood within the limits of binary thinking. It is, in fact, a story that belongs to the cosmos, to the chaotic interplay of forces that shape not just human lives, but the very fabric of reality itself.




Breaking Boundaries in Literature : The Nobel Prize and Korea's Untold Stories


Book Description

"Breaking Boundaries in Literature: The Nobel Prize and Korea's Untold Stories" is a journey that transcends the familiar boundaries of literary critique. In this bold narrative, I delve into the heart of a question that has long troubled me: why does a prestigious award like the Nobel Prize often recognize works that fail to capture the full spectrum of the human experience, let alone the complex cultural sentiments of nations like Korea? At first glance, it may seem as though this is a book about literary criticism—a questioning of how one-sided perspectives come to dominate global recognition. But at its core, this work is much more than a critique of literary bias. It is an exploration of the multiverse itself, a challenge to the idea that the Nobel Prize, or any human-made institution, can truly grasp the depth of experience that exists beyond anthropocentric narratives. In a world defined by quantum uncertainty and the principles of relativity, why do we still cling to the notion that a singular "truth" or "universal" story can represent all of us? I ask this as someone who has spent years observing the increasing polarization in literature—where binary thinking, political ideologies, and human-centered concerns dominate. But the natural world, the cosmos in which we exist, operates on principles far beyond our limited comprehension. Could it be that in seeking to capture a singular "universal human experience," we are ignoring the more profound and chaotic truths that surround us?




The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War


Book Description

Traditional histories of the Korean War have long focused on violations of the thirty-eighth parallel, the line drawn by American and Soviet officials in 1945 dividing the Korean peninsula. But The interrogation rooms of the Korean War presents an entirely new narrative, shifting the perspective from the boundaries of the battlefield to inside the interrogation room. Upending conventional notions of what we think of as geographies of military conflict, Monica Kim demonstrates how the Korean War evolved from a fight over territory to one over human interiority and the individual human subject, forging the template for the U.S. wars of intervention that would predominate during the latter half of the twentieth century and beyond. Kim looks at how, during the armistice negotiations, the United States and their allies proposed a new kind of interrogation room: one in which POWs could exercise their "free will" and choose which country they would go to after the ceasefire. The global controversy that erupted exposed how interrogation rooms had become a flashpoint for the struggles between the ambitions of empire and the demands for decolonization, as the aim of interrogation was to produce subjects who attested to a nation's right to govern. The complex web of interrogators and prisoners -- Japanese-American interrogators, Indian military personnel, Korean POWs and interrogators, and American POWs -- that Kim uncovers contradicts the simple story in U.S. popular memory of "brainwashing" during the Korean War




The City in Crimson Cloak


Book Description

From an “exceptionally sensitive and perceptive” Turkish writer and human rights activist (Orhan Pamuk, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature), the captivating story of a writer whose own autobiographical novel forces her to come to terms with the dichotomy of the city she once loved: Rio de Janeiro. Özgür is a young woman on fire: poor, hungry, and on the verge of a mental breakdown. She has only one weapon: her ability to write the city that has robbed her of everything, Rio de Janeiro. Through the reading of the bits and pieces of Özgür’s unfinished eponymous novel, with its autobiographical protagonist named Ö, Özgür’s story begins to emerge. As Özgür follows Ö through the shanty towns, Condomble rituals, and the violence and sexuality of the streets of Rio, the reader follows Özgür as she searches for a way to make peace with life, a route to catharsis. Together, the two concentric novels reveal the blurry borderline between the two Rio's -- one a metaphor for death, one a city of life. A major hit when it was released in Turkey and Europe, The City in Crimson Cloak is brilliantly evocative and wildly experimental, doing for Rio what Joyce did for Dublin.




America, History and Life


Book Description

Article abstracts and citations of reviews and dissertations covering the United States and Canada.




The Stone Building and Other Places


Book Description

"Aslı Erdoğan is an exceptionally perceptive and sensitive writer who always produces perfect literary texts."—Orhan Pamuk "One volume of short stories, The Stone Building and Other Places has become a bestseller in Turkey."—The New York Times "Beautifully written and honestly told, as tender as the tulip gardens of Istanbul and as brave as the human heart."—Elif Safak, author of The Forty Rules of Love Three interconnected stories feature women whose lives have been interrupted by forces beyond their control. Exile, serious illness, or the imprisonment of one's beloved are each met with versions of strength and daring, while there is no undoing what fate has wrought. These atmospheric, introspective tales culminate in an experimental, multi-voiced novella, whose "stone building" is a metaphor for the various oppressive institutions—prisons, police headquarters, hospitals, and psychiatric asylums—that dominate the lives of all of these characters. Here is a literary distillation of the alienation, helplessness, and controlled fury of exile and incarceration—both physical and mental—presented in a series of moving, allegorical portraits of lives ensnared by the structures of power. Aslı Erdoğan (Istanbul, 1967) was arrested and imprisoned by the Turkish government in a sweeping roundup of dissident voices after the failed coup attempt of July 2016. The subject of both PEN International and PEN America advocacy campaigns, she has published novels, collections of short stories and poetic prose, and selections from her political essays. As a journalist, she has covered controversial topics such as state violence, discrimination, and human rights, for which she has been persecuted in a variety of ways.




The New American Poetry, 1945-1960


Book Description

"Donald Allen's prophetic anthology had an electrifying effect on two generations, at least, of American poets and readers. More than the repetition of familiar names and ideas that most anthologies seem to be about, here was the declaration of a collective, intelligent, and thoroughly visionary work-in-progress: the primary example for its time of the anthology-as-manifesto. Its republication today--complete with poems, statements on poetics, and autobiographical projections--provides us, again, with a model of how a contemporary anthology can and should be shaped. In these essentials it remains as fresh and useful a guide as it was in 1960."--Jerome Rothenberg, editor of Poems for the Millennium "The New American Poetry is a crucial cultural document, central to defining the poetics and the broader cultural dynamics of a particular historical moment."--Alan Golding, author of From Outlaw to Classic: Canons in American Poetry




A Thousand Splendid Suns


Book Description

A riveting and powerful story of an unforgiving time, an unlikely friendship and an indestructible love




The Korean War


Book Description

A BRACING ACCOUNT OF A WAR THAT IS EITHER MISUNDERSTOOD, FORGOTTEN, OR WILLFULLY IGNORED For Americans, it was a discrete conflict lasting from 1950 to 1953. But for the Asian world the Korean War was a generations-long struggle that still haunts contemporary events. With access to new evidence and secret materials from both here and abroad, including an archive of captured North Korean documents, Bruce Cumings reveals the war as it was actually fought. He describes its origin as a civil war, preordained long before the first shots were fired in June 1950 by lingering fury over Japan’s occupation of Korea from 1910 to 1945. Cumings then shares the neglected history of America’s post–World War II occupation of Korea, reveals untold stories of bloody insurgencies and rebellions, and tells of the United States officially entering the action on the side of the South, exposing as never before the appalling massacres and atrocities committed on all sides. Elegantly written and blisteringly honest, The Korean War is, like the war it illuminates, brief, devastating, and essential.




American Spartan


Book Description

Lawrence of Arabia meets Sebastian Junger's War in this unique, incendiary, and dramatic true story of heroism and heartbreak in Afghanistan written by a Pulitzer Prize–nominated war correspondent. Army Special Forces Major Jim Gant changed the face of America’s war effort in Afghanistan. A decorated Green Beret who spent years in Afghanistan and Iraq training indigenous fighters, Gant argued for embedding autonomous units with tribes across Afghanistan to earn the Afghans’ trust and transform them into a reliable ally with whom we could defeat the Taliban and counter al-Qaeda networks. The military's top brass, including General David Petraeus, commander of U.S. Forces in Afghanistan, approved, and Gant was tasked with implementing his controversial strategy. Veteran war correspondent Ann Scott Tyson first spoke with Gant when he was awarded the Silver Star in 2007. Tyson soon came to share Gant’s vision, so she accompanied him to Afghanistan, risking her life to embed with the tribes and chronicle their experience. And then they fell in love. Illustrated with dozens of photographs, American Spartan is their remarkable story—one of the most riveting, emotional narratives of wartime ever published.