Brian Reynolds Myers

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Brian Reynolds Myers (born 1963) is an American critic and professor of North Korean literature, culture, and society, who lives and works in South Korea. He is the author of Han Sǒrya and North Korean Literature (Cornell, 1994) and A Reader's Manifesto (Melville House, 2002), but is known almost exclusively in the United States for the second work.

Myers is a researcher at Dongseo University. He was an assistant professor at Inje University from 2005 to 2006 and taught at Korea University from 2001 to 2005. He is a contributing editor to The Atlantic Monthly, which published his literary polemic against American Postmodernist fiction, "A Reader's Manifesto," in the July/August 2001 issue. He is published in The New York Times, The Korea Times, and The Wall Street Journal.

A self-described "Fort Dix army brat," Myers was born in the state of New Jersey in the United States, spent his early childhood in Bermuda, grew up in South Africa, pursued graduate studies in Germany, and worked for sometime in the People's Republic of China. He is a polyglot who is conversant in the Afrikaans, English, German, Korean, Mandarin, and Russian languages.

He earned his MA degree at Ruhr University in Bochum, writing a thesis on Stalinist panegyrics titled "Personenkult und Poesie" (1989). His PhD degree was obtained at the University of Tubingen, where he completed an English-language dissertation on the North Korean writer Han Sǒrya (1992). This major literary biography was adopted into the Cornell East Asia Series.

Myers later taught German in Japan, worked for an automobile manufacturer in China, and purchased a house in New Mexico, United States, relocating there in 1999. He wrote and self-published Gorgons in the Pool (1999) after his disenchantment with the fiction of prize-winning American writers such as Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, David Guterson, Cormac McCarthy, and Annie Proulx.

The Atlantic Monthly contracted an essay version of the obscure Gorgons in the Pool and published the finished polemic as "A Reader's Manifesto." With the success of the essay, it was developed into the book A Reader's Manifesto: An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness of American Literary Prose. Both publications were not generally well received by professional literary critics and specialists.

Myers concentrates his scholarship in the field of North Korean Studies. He has introduced the arguments that the Soviet Stalinist literary doctrine of socialist realism failed in North Korea, that late President Kim Il Sung’s 1955 Juche speech is not nationalist, that son and successor Kim Jong Il is a symbolic "mother" figure for the regime, and that North Korea is a fascist not a Stalinist state.

Brian Reynolds Myers is a supporter of the Green Party (United States), animal rights, and veganism. He is married to Myunghee Ko.

[edit] Selected works

  • "Personenkult und Poesie: Die Panegyriken der Stalin-Zeit." MA thesis. Ruhr-Universitat Bochum, 1989.
  • "Mother Russia: Soviet Characters in North Korean Fiction." Korean Studies 16 (1992): 82-93.
  • Han Sǒrya and North Korean Literature: The Failure of Socialist Realism in the DPRK. Ithaca, NY: Cornell East Asia Program, 1994. ISBN 0-939657-69-4.
  • Gorgons in the Pool. [n.p.]. 1999.
  • A Reader's Manifesto: An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness of American Literary Prose. Hoboken, NJ: Melville House, 2002. ISBN 0971865906.
  • "The Obsessions of Kim Jong Il." The New York Times. 19 May 2003.
  • "The Watershed that Wasn't: Re-Evaluating Kim Il Sung's 'Juche Speech' of 1955." Acta Koreana 9.1 (January 2006): 89-115. (http://actakoreana.org/publs).
  • "Kim Jong-il's Suicide Watch." The New York Times. 12 October 2006. P. A29.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

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