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This article examines how the media has portrayed the changing public perception of money in postwar South Korea, in a society in which many people’s identity is enmeshed with economic life goals. While many scholars have focused on the phenomenon of economic development, this article examines the formation of a culture that gratifies moneymaking and commends wealth. I argue that the culture of capitalism and ethics in contemporary South Korea underwent significant change during the postwar period. In the early 1960s, not only was the opportunity to become rich scarce, but also people who became affluent had to justify their wealth through charitable actions and demonstrating social responsibility to shed the notion that moneymaking was due to coincidence or linked to corruption. In less than a decade, however, becoming rich both became possible in the popular imaginations of ordinary people and started to gain legitimacy as a desirable action. This changing public perception of affluence reveals a development of the culture embracing wealth and an abandonment of historically negative public perceptions of money and wealth.

This article offers a fresh look into one of the key events of North Korean history, the ideological campaign of the 1970s which promoted Kim Jong-il (Kim Chŏngil 金正日) as the successor to his father. Previous research on the subject has generally been limited to analyzing open sources. I, however, obtained a copy of an electronic archive of the restricted-access DPRK newspaper Chosŏn inmin’gun 조선인민군. This discovery, along with North Korea’s declassification of some information about Kim Jong-il’s campaign, makes it possible to compare how the campaign was presented in open and restricted sources.

This article examines the literary predecessors of contemporary South Korean wealth inequality critiques, arguing for the inseparability of such parables, particularly Lee Chang-dong’s (Yi Ch’angdong 李滄東) Burning (Pŏning 버닝2018), from a contested tradition of writing about generational poverty and discrimination. Focusing on literary representations of the Cold War-era guilt-by-association system or yŏnjwaje 緣坐制, it draws out the relationship between the anti-communist epistemologies of authoritarian regimes, the right-wing literature of Yi Munyŏl 李文烈, and the leftist-nationalist allegories of Lee, a novelist before his turn to film. United by what Eve Sedgwick has identified as paranoid epistemologies of exposure, these diverse forms of writing revolved around the investigation of the identity of the alleged traitor, often the spectral leftist father blamed for the socioeconomic immobility of his surviving family members. Whether reactionary or subversive, such texts affirmed the inescapability and rigidity of patrilineal inheritance, an understanding of identity and kinship that the feminist works of Ch’oe Yun 崔允 and Pak Wansŏ 朴婉緖 would challenge in two critical ways. First, these works highlighted the mutual constitution of war and domesticity, destabilizing visions of the individual or family as separate from and aligned against the social order; second, they revealed the origins of an enduring Cold War subjectivity of exposure in Korean War-era state apparatuses of identification, drawing attention to the complicity of the act of writing in the perpetuation of the sociocultural structure of the yŏnjwaje even after its legal abolition.

This study explores paratextual transformations in the translation of Kobal 고발 by the North Korean writer Bandi (Pandi 반디) in terms of intralingual, interlingual, and intersemiotic translation. The manuscript was originally smuggled out of North Korea and published in South Korea by a right-wing publisher as a book on anti-communism. It has since been translated in 28 countries, gaining worldwide attention and winning the English PEN award. It was also republished in South Korea, with a focus on human rights through paratextual transformation. Paratexts act as powerful packaging instruments largely influenced by socio-cultural context. As a publication written by a North Korean writer, the paratexts in translations of Kobal are directly related to how the receiving country sees South and North Korea. We examine six translations in different languages centering on the paratextual changes, including the title, cover image, prefatorial material, and epitext to explore the perspectives inherent in them and the ways they interact with each other. This analysis of paratextual shifts involves not only translators, publishers, and editors, but also a much wider variety of agents such as literary agents, critics, journalists, and reviewers. This study thus seeks to demonstrate the possibility of expanding the links between translation studies and Korean studies, and also of broadening the horizons of translation studies.