Modern Korean Literature: An Anthology (review)

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS219 few. As a sociologist, I wish that Kim had shared more of his insights on several questions. First, why is it that South Korean businesses exhibit influences of both Western and Japanese industrial organizations? Second, how have the seemingly divergent practices of Korean, Western, and Japanese industrial organizations, and traditional and modern social customs and values, found niches or fused into the everyday lives of South Korean workers and business people? Third, what difficulties and advantages did Kim's dual role confer? He was a native-speaker of Korean and a distant relative of the head of Poongsan, but also an American anthropologist from an American university. We get glimpses of this dilemma, especially during Kim's examination of the Angang labor strike, but we do not see how these challenges were overcome. It would have been interesting to see whether Kim himself felt that this duality enhanced or limited his study. I strongly recommend this book for anyone interested in comparative analysis of industrial organizations in Asia, as well as for those interested in case studies of South Korean businesses. Quotes from interviews with the head of Poongsan and managers, workers, and labor leaders provide a rich and pleasurable reading experience. This book is one of the best written on the subject of contemporary South Korean business. Eun Mee Kim University of Southern California REFERENCES Eckert, Carter J. 1991 . Offspring ofEmpire: The Koch 'ang Kims and the Colonial Origins ofKorean Capitalism. Seattle: University of Washington Press. McNamara, Dennis L. 1990. The Colonial Origins ofKorean Enterprise, 1910-1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Modern Korean Literature: An Anthology, compiled and edited by Peter H. Lee. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1990. 442 pp. Peter Lee has previously compiled or edited three other anthologies of Korean literature in English translation: Anthology of Korean Literature (1981), which covers various literary genres up to the nineteenth century, Flowers ofFire (1974, 1986), a collection of short stories from the 1920s to the 1970s, and The Silence ofLove (1980), a collection of poetry from the same period. His latest anthology essentially replaces the latter two, Flowers of Fire and The Silence ofLove, by combining both short stories 220BOOK REVIEWS and poetry into a single volume. But it also adds several new elements, such as an excerpt from a novel, a play, new sections on modern essays and modern shijo poems, and short stories and poems from the 1980s. The fiction and poetry entries are divided into chronological sections and grouped together under the alternating section headings, Modern Fiction I-V and Modern Poetry I-IV Interspersed among them are the additional sections on modern shijo, modern essays, and modern drama. Lee begins the anthology with a general introduction to modern Korean literature , and precedes each entry with brief introductory remarks about the author and the work. Lee also translated almost all the selections appearing in the anthology, except for the works in Modern Fiction IV and V. By necessity, this anthology contains many works already found in Flowers of Fire, but there are also many new entries, most notably the excerpts from a novel by Yi Kwang-su, one of the most important figures in modern Korean literature. The additional short stories from the 1980s also help bring this anthology refreshingly up-to-date. Poetry, on the other hand, appears to suffer considerably by the new arrangement. The Silence of Love lists the poets in simple, chronological order and gives ample room for a fairly representative selection of their works. However, perhaps due to space limitations, the new anthology manages to include only a few of the poems of many poets, and only one each of poets like Yi Sang-hwa and Shim Hun. Unlike the simple, chronological presentation of works in his previous two anthologies of modern literature, the alternating arrangement of the sections in this anthology is confusing and annoying to the reader. It is easy enough to see that the sections are arranged chronologically, but it takes some digging through the editorial comments to figure out how the eight decades of the twentieth century are divided into four sections for poetry and five for fiction. Simple titles like "Modern Fiction from...