What has the literature of division meant for the two Koreas over the years?

They remain officially at war, a situation unchanged since 1953 when the Armistice Agreement, signed by China, North Korea and the United States, brought an end to active hostilities on the peninsula.

But the Armistice was not a peace settlement and tensions along the DMZ, the 38th parallel, have continued ever since. This long stalemate between the divided Koreas has prevented most kinds of social, cultural and political exchanges, with some exceptions.

In the conclusion to our conversation, I. Jonathan Kief, a Korea Foundation post-doctoral fellow at the University of Michigan’s Nam Center for Korean Studies, continues to explore the unconventional perspective on the relationship between writers in North and South Korea, in both the real and imagined ways in which literature of the post-war period managed to cross the 38th parallel in the post-war era.

This episode was produced in collaboration with the University of Michigan’s Nam Center for Korean Studies.