The Making of Modern Korean Poetry: Foreign Influences and Native Creativity by Kim Hyun-suk
Published 2003 · 100,000 words · about 8 hours at an average pace · Non-Fiction, Literary Criticism, Literary History
How hard is The Making of Modern Korean Poetry: Foreign Influences and Native Creativity to read?
The Making of Modern Korean Poetry: Foreign Influences and Native Creativity scores 35 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: 63 out of 100
- Prosodic terminology, comparative literary-historical vocabulary, and specific Korean poetic terms require sustained familiarity with the field.
- Sentence structure: 58 out of 100
- Abstraction: 72 out of 100
- Arguments about poetic influence, formal transformation, and the relationship between individual creativity and cultural tradition.
- Information density: 75 out of 100
- Dense with prosodic analysis, literary-historical context, translated poetry, and comparative argument.
- Narrative indirection: 18 out of 100
- The thesis about hybrid poetic modernity is stated clearly; it unfolds through individual poet case studies.
- Symbolic density: 16 out of 100
- Kim analyzes symbolic systems within Korean poetry rather than deploying her own symbolic argumentation.
- Ironic distance: 15 out of 100
- Kim notes the productive ironies of poets resisting foreign influence through formal assimilation but does not foreground this as a critical posture.
- Resolution withholding: 12 out of 100
- Each chapter resolves its poet-centered argument; the larger revisionist claim is stated and supported throughout.
- Structural complexity: 42 out of 100
- Poet-by-poet organization within a comparative framework; readers must track both individual careers and the overarching argument about formal hybridity.
How The Making of Modern Korean Poetry: Foreign Influences and Native Creativity is regarded
The Making of Modern Korean Poetry: Foreign Influences and Native Creativity holds a literary regard score of 72 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.