An Inquiry of Intentions in Kim Hye-yong's 'First Meeting': A North Korean Short Story in Korea Today (2007).

Abstract

This paper examines the problem of the intentional fallacy in the North Korean short story 'First Meeting' by Kim Hye-yong. Serially published in Korea Today in 2007, the nationalist allegory centres on Shin Ch'ong-mi, a young female journalist in Pyongyang, who falls in love with her penfriend Song-u, a soldier in the Korean People's Army, and struggles to remain devoted to him when he suddenly stops writing. With the literary-critical method of counterintuitive reading, the inquiry analyses the structural relations of the narrative, its discourse on desire, its apparent intentions, and its contravening elements, revealing an incidental unstable narrative that is symbolically protesting of the moral of the story to affectionately embrace the political authority of the North Korean party-army regime in the military-first (songun) era