The Literary Ideas of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il

An Introduction to North Korean Meta-Authorial Perspectives
By Alzo David-West

Kim Il Sung’s Duties of Literature and Arts in Our Revolution (1972) and Kim Jong Il’s On the Art of the Cinema (1973) are two North Korean cultural policy statements that the Foreign Languages Publishing House in Pyongyang translated and published in English over three decades ago. Neither document, however, has been formally outlined on comparative terms in English-language scholarship. Since the time both works appeared and especially with the onset of the post-Soviet 1990s, major structural changes have occurred in North Korea: economic crisis, famine, capitalist “reform” measures, penetration of foreign capital, cracks in the information control system, sociological and psychological shifts, and the turn from party to military dictatorship in the post-Kim Il Sung regime of Kim Jong Il.

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Abraham Lincoln

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