This presentation offers an unconventional perspective on the relationship between writers in late 1950s and early 1960s North and South Korea. It is often assumed that the ongoing state of war between the two Koreas prevented all media from crossing the thirty-eighth parallel. However, this is not entirely true. Focusing on a series of open letters written by writers in North Korea to their friends and colleagues in the South, this presentation explores the real as well as imagined ways in which literature of this period crossed the thirty-eighth parallel. In so doing, it attempts to outline a more complicated and nuanced understanding of what "division literature" meant in Korea across these tumultuous years.

I Jonathan Kief is a Korea Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the Nam Center for Korean Studies. He received his Ph.D. in 2016 from the Department of East Asian Languages & Cultures and the Institute for Comparative Literature & Society at Columbia University. Narrated through the lens of a series of debates about the term "humanism" in mid-twentieth-century Korea, his dissertation offered one of the first in-depth attempts to write a connected history of postcolonial North and South Korean literature. While at the Nam Center, he is preparing his book manuscript for publication.