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There a Petal Silently Falls
Ch'Oe Yun
€ 45.45
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Description for There a Petal Silently Falls
Hardcover. Inspired by the Kwangju Massacre of 1980, in which 2,000 civilians were killed for protesting the government's military rule, this novella recounts the wanderings of a girl traumatized by her mother's murder and exemplifies the injustice of state-sanctioned violence against women. Translator(s): Fulton, Bruce; Fulton, Ju-Chan. Series: Weatherhead Books on Asia. Num Pages: 200 pages. BIC Classification: FYB. Category: (P) Professional & Vocational. Dimension: 210 x 140 x 21. Weight in Grams: 408.
Ch'oe Yun is a Korean author known for her breathtaking versatility, subversion of authority, and bold exploration of the inner life. Readers celebrate her creative play with fantasy and admire her deep engagement with trauma, history, and the vagaries of remembrance. In this collection's title work, There a Petal Silently Falls, Ch'oe explores both the genesis and the aftershocks of historical outrages such as the Kwangju Massacre of 1980, in which a reported 2,000 civilians were killed for protesting government military rule. The novella follows the wanderings of a girl traumatized by her mother's murder and strikes home the injustice of state-sanctioned violence against men and especially women. "Whisper Yet" illuminates the harsh treatment of leftist intellectuals during the years of national division, at the same time offering the hope of reconciliation between ideological enemies. The third story, "The Thirteen-Scent Flower," satirizes consumerism and academic rivalries by focusing on a young man and woman who engender an exotic flower that is coveted far and wide for its various fragrances. Elegantly crafted and quietly moving, Ch'oe Yun's stories are among the most incisive portrayals of the psychological and spiritual reality of post-World War II Korea. Her fiction, which began to appear in the late 1980s, represents a turn toward a more experimental, deconstructionist, and postmodern Korean style of writing, and offers a new focus on the role of gender in the making of Korean history.
Product Details
Format
Hardback
Publication date
2008
Publisher
Columbia University Press United States
Number of pages
200
Condition
New
Series
Weatherhead Books on Asia
Number of Pages
200
Place of Publication
New York, United States
ISBN
9780231142960
SKU
V9780231142960
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 15 to 20 working days
Ref
99-15
About Ch'Oe Yun
Ch'oe Yun, in addition to being an award-winning author, is professor of French literature at S?gang University in Seoul, Korea, and has translated contemporary Korean fiction into French. She received the 1992 Tongin Literature Prize for "The Gray Snowman" and the 1994 Yi Sang Literature Prize for "The Last of Hanak'o." Translations of her works can be found in Modern Korean Fiction: An Anthology (Columbia University Press, 2005) and Land of Exile: Contemporary Korean Fiction. Her writings have also been translated into French and Spanish.Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton are the translators of the Korean women's anthologies Words of Farewell and Wayfarer and cotranslators with Marshall R. Pihl of Land of Exile. They have also translated contemporary Korean novels such as Hwang Sun-won's Trees on a Slope and Cho Se-hui's The Dwarf. Bruce Fulton is the inaugural holder of the Young-Bin Min Chair in Korean Literature and Literary Translation at the University of British Columbia, cotranslator of A Ready-Made Life, coeditor of Modern Korean Fiction, feature editor of Seeing the Invisible, and associate editor for Korea of The Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literature.
Reviews for There a Petal Silently Falls
There a Petal Silently Falls, by one of contemporary South Korea's most respected authors, was an early attempt to confront the scandal of the Kwangju Massacre. Faced with censorship and a regime that denied the atrocities it had committed, Ch'oe Yun evokes in narrative form a trauma that defied narration. Today the vagaries of memory, rather than censorship, threaten to silence the history of Kwangju. May this most welcome of translations serve as a timely reminder of those events of spring 1980.
Janet Poole, assistant professor of East Asian studies, University of Toronto Haunting, painful and affirming, full of illusions and hallucinations while rooted in the graphically physical... Everything about Yun's work is brilliant. Publishers Weekly (starred review) These three stories are the work of a fiction writer of the very highest order. Booklist (starred review) Ch'oe is a versatile writer who cloaks stark perceptions of individual and social trauma with elegant craft, poignant metaphor, and occasional, sardonic flashes of humor.
Barbara Lloyd McMichael Seattle Times A very welcome addition to existing works of Korean literature in English translation. Acta Koreana It is a great pleasure to see this book added to the Weatherhead Books on Asia list.
David McCann Pacific Affairs Beyond Korean Studies... [this] book should also be read widely by scholars engaged in trauma studies.
Youngju Ryu Journal of Asian Studies A superb collection Tony's Reading List
Janet Poole, assistant professor of East Asian studies, University of Toronto Haunting, painful and affirming, full of illusions and hallucinations while rooted in the graphically physical... Everything about Yun's work is brilliant. Publishers Weekly (starred review) These three stories are the work of a fiction writer of the very highest order. Booklist (starred review) Ch'oe is a versatile writer who cloaks stark perceptions of individual and social trauma with elegant craft, poignant metaphor, and occasional, sardonic flashes of humor.
Barbara Lloyd McMichael Seattle Times A very welcome addition to existing works of Korean literature in English translation. Acta Koreana It is a great pleasure to see this book added to the Weatherhead Books on Asia list.
David McCann Pacific Affairs Beyond Korean Studies... [this] book should also be read widely by scholars engaged in trauma studies.
Youngju Ryu Journal of Asian Studies A superb collection Tony's Reading List