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The Korean War Through Literature and Art
"Writing about war," writes Steven I. Levine in his essay, "Some Reflections on the Korean War," is often in the forms of "exorcising ghosts, of banishing Banquo from the feast of living." To be sure, whether it is a poem, a short story, or even a photograph, it is remembering those voices, those lives who can no longer tell their story and of "making room at our table for their ghostly presence." Above all, it is to "remind us again and again of the repetitive tragedy of war."
With the history of war, historians have their, own criteria, their own approach or agenda to get at the truth and tell the story. Theirs is one of battles and strategies, the cause and effect of war. The artists and the poets though, also have their agenda to get at the truth and to let these voices speak again. However, unlike the historians, the artists and the poets are motivated by, or deeply rooted in the exploration of the human condition the "human dimensions" of war and its impact on the cross-cultural applications with the study of war.
The Korean War was a conflict of infinite human dimensions. The very nature of this fratricidal war was intertwined with the lives and families of Koreans up and down the peninsula. While it has been unfortunately termed the "forgotten war" in America, in Korea it has been anything but forgotten. As Levine points out, "that the Korean War haunts very few Americans the way it haunts many Koreans, particularly from the older generations, is only natural." It is an unfinished event for Koreans with a country still divided, and for many, families still separated. Almost every family across the peninsula was affected by the war in one way or another.
In Remembering the "Forgotten War "-the Korean War Through, Literature and Art, the conflict is seen and interpreted through the voices and visions of American and Korean writers; artists, filmmakers, and photographers in a collection of eleven essays. More than a historical study of the war, this collection of essays delves right into the very soul of the war through the lives of these artists and poets or their observations of...