Archetypal Themes in North Korean Literature: Working Notes on Problems and Possibilities

This paper, composed as a set of working notes, addresses the problems and possibilities of applying Jungian analytical psychology to North Korean literature, one of the most neglected and rarefied subjects of inquiry in Anglo-American literary scholarship. Despite the unusualness of such an application, literary works produced in national-Stalinist North Korea employ prominent motifs and symbols that are familiar in Jungian archetypal criticism, for example, family, father, mother, and child archetypes. These archetypes are peculiar in that they are realized within the state-sanctioned political and narrative framework of a nationally and culturally adapted socialist realism.