Week 12: North Korea (until 1993)

Submit a blog post that is a 5-15 report. Your “Reading Journal” comprises the texts you read for Week 9, and anything you are reading for your Pressbooks Chapter project.

Remember to also add any tasks that are on your to-do list (not those scheduled for the whole class, but for you individually, e.g. sorting out a blog-related issue), and any open questions or issues you want to flag up for follow-up with me. These weekly reports are extremely useful for me to get an insight in how you’re working, what you make of the course and the materials, and how I can best support your learning and adjust the course.

TIP: for anything you’re not comfortable putting in a blog where others can read it, you can just drop me a message on discord OR post anonymously on the Padlet!

Time estimate: 2-3hrs to prepare, 75mins meeting.

Background:

• Seth, Michael. “12. North Korea: Recovery, Transformation and Decline”. In A Concise History of Korea: From Antiquity to the Present, third ed. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2019.
  • ebook Trexler or your own copy
  • Read to get up to speed on the historical background; we do a deeper dive into a small part of the fascinating history.

FOCUS FOR CLASS:

• Tertitskiy, Fyodor. “The Ascension of the Ordinary Man: How the Personality Cult of Kim Il-Sung Was Constructed (1945–1974).” Acta Koreana 18, no. 1 (2015): 209–31.
  • Available via Trexler library
  • Task: Keep track of the ups and downs in the development of a personality cult: specific actions, points in time etc.
• Kim, Il-sung. “On Eliminating Dogmatism and Formalism and Establishing Juche [Chuch’e] in Ideological Work.” In Sources of Korean Tradition, Volume Two: From the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Centuries, edited by Yŏngho Ch’oe, Peter H. Lee, and Wm. Theodore De Bary, 419-425. Introduction to Asian Civilizations. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.
  • PDF
  • Primary source. Questions: Juche is the North Korean ideology which governs all of life, and can be seen as something akin to “self reliance” or independence. Many scholars accept North Korea’s narrative that Kim Il-sung introduced the concept with this speech (but Myers shows the term’s history is more complicated). What is the call to action? What does juche mean according to this text?
• Kim, Hangil. Modern History of Korea. Pyongyang: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1979.
  • PDF
  • Primary source. This (very brief!) extract gives you two small examples of how by 1979 North Koreans presented their history. Questions: Which differences do you observe with the history we learn about the Korean war? What happens when you put the Juche speech (previous bullet point) next to the section from this history book? What strikes you as strange, remarkable, interesting in the use of language?
  • You can find the whole book on the Internet Archive

Optional extras (if you have time and are interested)

The Internet Archive has some amazing materials from North Korea, here are just a few that fit with this week (more in two weeks’ time!)

• An hour of North Korea Communist Music (not ideal as study background music)
• “Welcome to Korea”, a 30 min. North Korean documentary from 1988 to entice foreign travelers to North Korea
• Flower Girl, 1972 movie, Kim Il-sung prize winner and based on the libretto for a revolutionary opera written by… Kim Il-sung. (2hr playtime)

A Google Doc, with comments on how you specifically addressed the feedback from your peers and me, and make commenting available to Muhlenberg community (so your peers can comment). You can continue working on the same Google Doc you submitted before.

Based on the feedback from your peers and me, rewrite your chapter.
A REWRITE is **NOT** TINKERING or EDITING. It may well mean a drastic rethinking of the entire project from the ground up and may involve any or all of the following:

• a new title to better capture the topic
• outline the chapter from scratch again
• completely reorganize sections
• add new sources (go to the library/databases and do the reading, notetaking, analysis etc)
• re-read sources to understand them better or integrate more carefully

What I have seen so far is that everyone has great ideas but needs to work them out in more detail.

Style-sheet with tips, and you can also add questions. I’ll do my best to answer them!

Time estimate: 30-45mins (a generous estimate I think)

Below you find links to four blog posts from your fellow students. If one of the websites is your own, or it is twice the same person’s, refresh the page, and you should get new sites. [Updated links coming on Tuesday.]

• Post 1: 
• Post 2: 
• Post 3: 
• Post 4: 

Leave feedback, questions, thoughts, insights about the contents of the posts of your fellow students, using Hypothes.is group HST259. You can ask for clarifications, point out similarities and differences with the material you covered, or with your interpretation. This should encourage you to nose around in the other materials you did not read in the first round.

Use the “Architect’s Model” of giving feedback, and engage with concrete issues. Go beyond “Yeah, I agree,” “I like” or “I think the same”, and instead explain why you have that reaction, or if you disagree, you can try to persuade the original poster of your idea or interpretation.

Remember that Hypothes.is allows for hyperlinks, e.g. to materials that support your argument, or you can include pictures (memes! [yes, there she is again]), videos etc. that help the original poster to learn more.

TIP: It’s all random, and it’s all good, so if you return to this page after commenting, you will see four different posts. As long as your comments are on four different posts in total, you’re fine! OR you can right-click and ask your browser to open the link in a new tab/window.

Enjoy the time off, or catch up on missing tasks for this class if you are behind. Get in touch if you are unsure what’s missing or how you need to catch up.