Symposia

Benoit Symposium: Capitalist Dreams in the Communist Utopia: North Korea’s The Schoolgirl’s Diary

By | September 30, 2013

Engaging with a contemporary North Korean film, Sherri Ter Molen unpacks the usage of symbols derived from foreign–and what are often seen as hostile–sources within a distinctly North Korean cultural product.

Benoit Symposium: Writers in the DPRK: The Invisible Stars

By | September 27, 2013

The author of “Soldiers on the Cultural Front,” Tatiana Gabroussenko analyses the conundrum of literary production in North Korea, a cultural space seemingly reverential of the product but deliberately ambivalent, if not actively hostile, towards the producer.

Benoit Symposium: From Pyongyang to Mars: Sci-fi, Genre, and Literary Value in North Korea

By | September 25, 2013

History and the past are subjects close to North Korea’s institutional and cultural heart, but what about cultural expressions of the potential future. In this essay, Benoit Berthelier explores the science fiction output of Pyongyang.

Benoit Symposium: Practice and Praxis of Cultural Production in North Korea: A Virtual Symposium on Production, Authorship, and Tone

By | September 25, 2013

A scholar at INALCO (Institute National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales) in Paris, Benoit Berthelier has joined Dr. Robert Winstanley-Chesters to co-edit an expansive virtual symposium on aesthetic and cultural production in North Korea. To start things off, Berthelier offers an opening salvo in what promises to be a splendid ride.