Guest Post! North Korea

Hey everyone. My name is Faith Savaiano, and I'm very excited to be doing a guest blog for Brian. I'm one of Brian's classmates, and he's always been jealous of me because of how much better at history I am than him. Just kidding...

Anyways, Brian talks a bit about repeating history and learning from those repetitions. Or not. This is quite apparent recently in the U.S.'s (and everyone else's) ongoing tensions with North Korea. Many people are quite frankly freaked out by North Korea's recent actions, while others find it mildly amusing.

There are, indeed, historical reasons to back up both of these reactions:

ALARM - The main reason for alarm is the man, or boy, calling the shots, Kim Jong-Un. Not only is he young and impulsive, but because of North Korea's veil of secrecy, no one really knows who he is. So when he threatens to hit South Korea or mainland USA with a preemptive nuclear strike, it's hard to know how long we can call his bluff. Kim Jong-Un is a man without a clear history, and that makes him scary.

AMUSEMENT - On the other hand, North Korea has a long history of making idle threats against the U.S. and others. Since the end of the Korean War in 1953, relations have been less than friendly between North Korea and the U.S., so we've exchanged our fair share of empty threats on both sides. Also, the complete control North Korea has over it's media often results in humorous publications, such as a 2011 Global Happiness Index, conducted by North Korea, which ranked China as the happiest country in the world, followed closely by North Korea in second (got to appreciate that modesty). "The American Empire" ranked a sad last on the list.

New Historicism

New Historicism is an interesting combination of literature and history.  And when I say that it's a combination of literature and history, I mean that it looks at literature to examine history.  It's a very postmodern idea, and is one of the few aspects of postmodernism that I actually can understand.

Fun fact: Calling something "Postmodern" is a great way to look intellectual without actually knowing anything.

Back on topic, New Historicists believe that classical works can't be examined through modern viewpoints, because those viewpoints are modern constructions.  Because they didn't exist when the piece was written, we can't apply them to the work.  Also, they believe that any analysis or criticism of a piece of literature will tell you more about the time in which the analysis criticism was written than anything about the actual literature.

So how do New Historicists look at literature?  They get back into the mind-frame of the time.  Think a character has a mental illness?  Then you've got to think about it in terms of the mental health treatment of that period, even if it seems insane now.  They can use concurrent literature as sources (with a broad definition of "literature" meaning anything that was written, including records), but works from other times are out.