South Korea's 1987 Democracy Movement: A Literary Companion by David R. McCann
Published 2004 · 90,000 words · about 8 hours at an average pace · Non-Fiction, Literary Criticism, Poetry Criticism
How hard is South Korea's 1987 Democracy Movement: A Literary Companion to read?
South Korea's 1987 Democracy Movement: A Literary Companion scores 33 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 60 out of 100
- Korean poetic terminology, literary-historical vocabulary, and translation-theory concepts in the editorial apparatus.
- Sentence structure: 55 out of 100
- Abstraction: 65 out of 100
- Arguments about poetic form, political censorship, and the relationship between sijo and modernity require sustained literary-theoretical engagement.
- Information density: 74 out of 100
- The critical apparatus is dense; each headnote compresses biography, literary context, formal analysis, and translation notes.
- Narrative indirection: 18 out of 100
- The anthology's argument about Korean poetic modernity unfolds across the critical apparatus rather than in a single thesis statement.
- Symbolic density: 18 out of 100
- McCann analyzes the symbolic density of Korean poetry rather than performing his own; the critical prose is transparent.
- Ironic distance: 15 out of 100
- Occasional wry observations about the gap between political repression and the poetry it inadvertently generated.
- Resolution withholding: 12 out of 100
- The critical apparatus states its arguments directly; the anthology form means no single argument requires sustained resolution.
- Structural complexity: 40 out of 100
- Anthology organized chronologically with critical apparatus; requires reading poetry and prose together for maximum benefit.
How South Korea's 1987 Democracy Movement: A Literary Companion is regarded
South Korea's 1987 Democracy Movement: A Literary Companion holds a literary regard score of 79 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.