The Dwarf / / Se-hŭi Cho.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter UHP eBook Package 2000-2013
• VerfasserIn: Cho, Se-hŭi,
• TeilnehmendeR: Fulton, Bruce.; Fulton, Ju-Chan.
• Place / Publishing House: Honolulu : : University of Hawaii Press, , [2006]; ©2006
• Year of Publication: 2006
• Language: English
• Series: Modern Korean Fiction
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (248 p.)

The dark side of South Korea's "economic miracle" emerges in The Dwarf, Cho Se-hui's enormously popular and critically acclaimed work. First published in 1978, it speaks to the painful social costs of reckless industrialization, even as it tellingly portrays the spiritual malaise of the newly rich and powerful and a working class subject to forces beyond its control. Cho's lean, clipped, deceptively simple style, the rapidly shifting points of view, terse dialogue, and subtle irony evoke the particularities of life in 1970s South Korea in the presence of global economic forces.The desperate realities of life for the dwarf, the proverbial little guy upon whose back Korea's economic transformation largely took place, are emotively rendered in twelve linked stories examining the lives of a laboring family, a family of the newly emerging middle class, and that of a wealthy industrialist. The stories have overlapping characters and situations: the murder of a swindler, a family's eviction from a squatter settlement, the assassination of an important executive, the dwarf 's fantasy of a planet where life is easier, his later suicide and the subsequent fate of his dispersed friends and family members.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- The Möbius Strip -- Knifeblade -- Space Travel -- A Little Ball Launched by a Dwarf -- On the Footbridge -- Orbital Rotation -- City of Machines -- The Cost of Living for a Family of Ŭngang Laborers -- The Fault Lies with God as Well -- The Klein Bottle -- The Spinyfish Entering My Net -- Epilogue -- Afterword: Cho Se-hŭi and The Dwarf