East Asian Humanities Workshop: "Dreaming DMZ: A Guide to Division for the South Korean Child," Dafna Zur

Please join us for the fourth session of the East Asian Humanities Workshop’s winter quarter sessions. This workshop will feature Professor Dafna Zur, who will give a talk titled "Dreaming DMZ: A Guide to Division for the South Korean Child". The talk will be followed by Q&A and discussion. Professor Zur is Associate Professor of Korean literature and culture in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures and the Director of the Center for East Asian Studies at Stanford. A light post-workshop dinner will be provided for attendees. 

Abstract: My presentation explores representations of the DMZ in South Korean films and literature for young readers. I show how these materials make manifest the dialectic of wartime palimpsest and ecological haven. I argue that, on one level, DMZ literature elides thorny issues around the cost of South Korea’s economic development, its precarious security situation, and its implication in the economies of East Asia. On the other hand, the materials’ visual grammar exposes their unwitting entry into a multiplicity of meaning, signaling a path towards what Youngju Ryu calls “reconciliation without truth” on the Korean peninsula.