The Korea Society - Cho Se-hui’s "The Dwarf"

Upcoming Events

Wed, May 21 - Katharine H.S. Moon
Wed, May 28 - Gallery Talk: Cross-Cultural Traffic - Toys
Thu, May 29 - Exhibit Opening, Panel: Kyopo Proj.
Fri, May 30 - Project Bridge Community Presentation
Thu, Jun 5 - Teachers Conference: Neo-Confucianism and Korea

Main Menu

Home

Announcements

TKS Store

Upcoming EventsMembershipLanguage Classes

Show Cart
Your Cart is currently empty.

Podcasts

Subscribe to our Podcasts on
iTunes or your RSS reader!

Address

950 Third Ave, 8th Flr,
New York, NY 10022
(212) 759-7525
Fax: (212) 759-7530

(Click for Map )

Home

Contemporary Issues

Cho Se-hui’s "The Dwarf"

April 24, 2007

It may seem improbable in a nation that’s grown steadily wealthier and more self-confidant for decades, but for a generation of South Koreans, the literary symbol of their national mood is a little person. The novel in which he appears, The Dwarf, by Cho Se-hui, is probably the most important piece of Korean fiction written since 1945 said Bruce Fulton, professor of Korean literature and literary translation at the University of British Columbia. At an evening lecture and reading at The Korea Society, Fulton introduced his audience to The Dwarf and explained its deep resonance with Korean readers.

Published in the late 1970s, The Dwarf isn’t quite a novel in the conventional sense: it’s a series of 12 stories united by common characters—a lower middle-class midget and his family, his neighbors and a set of powerful chaebol leaders—that mixes vivid realism with occasional flights of fantasy.

Cho’s writing bridges two of his era’s literary schools of thought. One held that writers should be guided by an ethos of social realism and political relevance. The other emphasized the importance of a distinctive style. Cho included both, and added much that was distinctly his own. A member of the han,gul generation (the first wave of Korean writers who had been educated in their native language) Cho felt the need to create a truly national work and so wrote in a simple syntax that made his work accessible to Koreans of all educational levels.

For his readers, Cho’s substance was just as accessible as his style. During the period, South Korea’s military government was embarked on an ambitious industrialization drive. It promised Koreans that new economic development would create a better quality of life. But where it didn’t discuss industrialization’s grim downsides, Cho did. The Dwarf’s characters are beset by chronic unemployment and hopelessness, pollution, poor public services and an unrelenting ethos of consumption. Though Korea is much more prosperous today than when Cho wrote, it’s no small detail that Koreans are still reading The Dwarf.
About the Speaker

Bruce Fulton is the inaugural holder of the Young-Bin Min Chair in Korean Literature and Literary Translation in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia. He obtained an MA in Korean regional studies from the University of Washington and a Ph.D. in modern Korean literature from Seoul National University. An expert in modern Korean fiction and translation, his research interests include the narrative techniques of Hwang Sun-won, contemporary Korean women's fiction and identity transformation as reflected in military-camptown fiction. He has co-translated several anthologies of modern Korean short fiction, including the prize-winning Words of Farewell: Stories by Korean Women Writers (1989; translated with Ju-Chan Fulton) and A Ready-Made Life: Early Masters of Modern Korean Fiction (1998; translated with Kim Chong-un). Fulton is co-editor (with Youngmin Kwon) of Modern Korean Fiction: An Anthology (2005; Columbia University Press) and edited the Korea sections of the Encyclopedia of Modern Asia and the Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literature.

VOICES program

with

Bruce Fulton

Young-Bin Min Chair in Korean Literature and Literary Translation
University of British Columbia

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

6:00 - 6:30 pm ♦ Registration and Reception
6:30 - 8:00 pm ♦ Lecture and Q&A

The Korea Society, 950 Third Avenue, Eighth Floor, New York City
(Building entrance on SW corner of Third Avenue and 57th Street)

Wine and refreshments will be served.

The dark side of rapid development emerges in The Dwarf, the bestselling Korean novel by Cho Se-hŭi. Critically lauded since it was first published in 1978, The Dwarf is a tale of breakneck industrialization, the painful costs it imposes on a disoriented working class and the spiritual malaise it brings to new elites. Cho's deceptively plain narration with its rapidly shifting points of view evokes the zeitgeist of South Korea in the late 1970s and his subject resonates in a world still grappling with the consequences of globalization.

At this VOICES program, professor Bruce Fulton will read from The Dwarf, which he has translated into English with Ju-Chan Fulton, and discuss its lasting significance.

Questions or registration? Tel: 212-759-7525 ext. 311; Fax: 212-759-7530; This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

[ Back ]