LTI Korea 
DLKL 
SIWF 
Featured Titles for Rights Sales
-
ISBN
9788960908949
- Author
-
Publisher
Maumsanchaek마음산책
-
Year Published
2024-09
-
Category
Essay 에세이
If you want to meet this book in your language, please vote!
- No results.
To view licensing and rights information for this book,
please sign in with your publisher, agency, editor or agent account.
Updated: 2026-02-27
- Posted by Maumsanchaek on 2026-02-27
Description 작품 소개
“So maybe it’s not that books about never giving up create readers who don’t give up. Maybe it’s the other way around. Maybe brave readers and brave books recognize one another.” – from the book
In At Odds With The World, acclaimed Korean poet Jin Eun-young presents an insightful and unflinching collection of essays that are equal parts criticism, philosophy, and biography.
The essays are organized as a series of meditative reflections on the works of famous authors and thinkers such as Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Ingeborg Bachmann, Simone Weil, Albert Camus, Sylvia Plath, and Hannah Arendt. Delving into both their established canonical texts as well as their less appreciated writings, the essays engage with the life and times of the writers behind the texts, weaving together biographical information and philosophical inquiry to provide a social critique of both their eras and our own. Beyond merely summarizing the works, these essays illuminate them from within through close readings of the text at hand, and by linking philosophical ideas to the lived experiences of their authors, many of whom have experienced conditions of political oppression, gender constraint, and emotional isolation.
These authors come from different cultures and eras, but are unified in their common search for meaning and human dignity. Each essay connects one seminal work with a contemporary question, exploring a unique intersection of life, literature, and philosophy. These questions, which were critical during the life and times of the thinkers who lived them, are no less urgent today. How do you cope when a person you deeply admire denies your people’s existence and seeks to undermine their success? In dissecting the untimely death of an author, are we celebrating her life or gawking voyeuristically at her macabre end? What was it like to live in a traditionally paternalistic society where the only escape you had was through fiction, by constructing alternative egos of a different gender? How must one live in a fascist state?
In illuminating the many ways that these misfit authors and thinkers, each at odds with the world, attempted to grapple with these questions and more, Jin Eun-young invites readers to sit with the complexity of their lives and ideas, and to see how literature and philosophy can help us make sense of our own.
“The premise of The Trial about a man who is arrested yet remains free is strange but wonderful. To be under arrest and still go where he pleases, to be criticized but still live as he chooses to live, are signs that he is free. But in this sense, the most vulnerable population in our society, including women, find themselves in a more difficult position than Kafka’s K. (…) The barest minimum that Kafka’s protagonist was allowed in the novel, in regards to a fundamental sense of freedom that he could enjoy even while under arrest, can only be guaranteed with an anti-discrimination law. Is it so difficult, in Korean society, to ensure the most basic existential rights imagined by a Czech minority writer, a hundred years ago?” – from the book
Author Bio 작가 소개
There are no expectations.