Fiction International 39

Fiction International 39
Author: Harold Jaffe
Publisher: Fiction International
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2006
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 9781879691773

Fictional International Relations

Fictional International Relations
Author: Sungju Park-Kang
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 187
Release: 2014-06-05
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1317970527

This book proposes the idea of fictional International Relations (IR) and engages with feminist IR by contextualising the case of a woman spy in Korea in the Cold War. Fictional imagination and feminist IR encourage one to go beyond conventional or standard ways of thinking; it reshapes taken-for-granted interpretations and assumptions. This takes the view that a dominant narrative of events might be reconstructed as a different kind of story, once events are placed within a wider temporal approach. The case of the woman Korean secret agent- who reportedly bombed a South Korean plane (Korean Airlines (KAL) Flight 858) under the instruction from the North Korean leadership to disrupt the Seoul Olympic Games- is chosen to serve as an effective example of fictional IR and feminist IR scholarship, which can be investigated through the research puzzles concerning gender, pain and truth. Fictional International Relations has three main objectives. First, it investigates the way in which fiction-writing can become a method for dealing with data problems and contingency in IR. Second, the book examines how gender, pain and truth operate or interact in the case of the Korean spy and how this observation can strengthen feminist IR in terms of intersectionality. Finally, the author goes on to explore why this case has been so difficult to study openly and thoroughly. The aim of the book is not to refute the official findings; the point is to unpack complex dynamics surrounding truth—more specifically how the official account has been executed as ‘the’ truth—based on a feminist-informed investigation. This book will be of interest to students of IR theory, critical security studies, Cold War studies, gender studies and Asian studies.

The International Novel

The International Novel
Author: Annabel Patterson
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2014-09-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 030021040X

Annabel Patterson here turns her well-known concern with political history in early modern England into an engine for investigating our own era and a much wider terrain. The focus of this book is, broadly, nationalism and internationalism today, approached not theoretically but through the lens of fiction. Novels are uniquely capable of dealing with abstract problems by embodying them in the experience of persons, thereby rendering them more “real.” Patterson takes twelve novels from (almost) all over the world: India, Africa, Turkey, Crete, the Balkans, Palestine, Afghanistan, South America, and Mexico, novels which illustrate the dire effects of some of the following: imperialism, partition, annexation, ethnic and religious strife, boundaries redrawn by aggression, the virus of dictatorships, the vulnerability of small countries, and the meddling of the Great Powers. All are highly instructive, and excellent reads.