Death Without End - by Theodore Hughes

About the Book

Theodore Hughes crosses borders to demonstrate how stories of dying and death--what he calls the thanatographic imagination--in North Korea, the US, and South Korea energize ideas about history, the present, and the future.

Book Synopsis

The Korean War was never formally declared, and no peace treaty ending the war was ever signed. The 1953 armistice did not stop the war but marked its extension and expansion into a warlike state of emergency. How did the new reality of life under armistice shape visions of the possible in North and South Korea? What meanings are attached to deaths in a so-called "limited war" that turned out to be limitless? What does the lack of an end to the Korean War reveal about the nature of war in the post-1945 era?

Theodore Hughes crosses borders to demonstrate how stories of dying and death--what he calls the thanatographic imagination--in North Korea, the US, and South Korea energize ideas about history, the present, and the future. Death Without End shows how literary texts, films, nonfiction, and other forms of cultural production from the late 1940s to the 1960s give rise to revolutionary belongings, gendered selfhoods, and anticommunist cosmopolitanisms as they address the incommensurate loss of life, violence, destruction, and suffering of the war. Hughes also traces how the Korean War entered US popular culture in unexpected but enduring ways. Bridging Korean studies, American studies, and the cultural turn in international relations, this book offers new ways to understand the unending Korean War and the global implications of its logic of limitlessness.

Review Quotes

Death Without End is a powerful death knell to the adage that peace is achieved by preparing for war. In these catastrophic end times, Theodore Hughes poignantly demonstrates how we got here when the Korean War's unendedness proved its "limited" character to be a farce, becoming a global template for our permanent state of war.--Suzy Kim, author of Among Women across Worlds: North Korea in the Global Cold War

Death Without End brilliantly reimagines how stories of death and dying animate new ways of seeing, feeling, and belonging in the post-1945 world. Moving across genres, media, and nations, it traces how the Korean War's limitless logic makes and unmakes the borders of history itself--Hieyoon Kim, author of Celluloid Democracy

In this long-awaited study of the Korean War through cultural texts, Hughes brings the two Koreas and the US into a single field of vision by exploring the death drive at the heart of post-armistice life in all three societies. An instant classic that brilliantly unpacks the thanatographic imagination sustaining limitless war in the militarized transpacific.--Youngju Ryu, author of Writers of the Winter Republic: Literature and Resistance in Park Chung Hee's Korea

About the Author

Theodore Hughes is Korea Foundation Professor of Korean Studies in the Humanities at Columbia University. He is the author of Literature and Film in Cold War South Korea: Freedom's Frontier (Columbia, 2012).