This volume represents the first English-language collection by the renowned Korean cultural and political critic Paik Nak-chung. Paik’s omnipresent theme is the “division system” on the Korean peninsula, the peculiar logic by which one nation remains divided into two states. These deeply humanistic essays foreground the needs of ordinary citizens and call for globally relevant solutions to Korea's divided reality.

Paik Nak-chung is emeritus professor of English literature at Seoul National University and co-chair of the Korea Peace Forum.

“A remarkable combination of scholar, author, critic, and activist, Paik Nak-chung carries forward in our time the ancient Korean ideal of marrying abstract learning to the daily, practical problems of the here and now. In this book he confronts no less than the core problem facing the Korean people since the mid-twentieth century: the era of national division, of two Koreas, an anomaly for a people united across millennia and who formed the basic sinews of their nation long before European nation-states began to develop.”—From the foreword, by Bruce Cumings