Brian Reynolds Myers

Brian Reynolds Myers (born 1963) is an American critic and researcher of North Korean literature, culture, and society, who lives and works in Busan, 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.

Affiliation

Myers is an associate professor in the International Studies department 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.

Biography

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 some time in the People's Republic of China. He is a polyglot who is conversant in the Afrikaans, English, German, Korean, Mandarin, and Russian languages.

Education

He earned his MA degree at Ruhr University in Bochum, writing a thesis on Soviet 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 literary biography was adopted into the Cornell East Asia Series as Han Sǒrya and North Korean Literature: The Failure of Socialist Realism in the DPRK.

Literary studies

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 postmodernist 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 Gorgons in the Pool and published the finished polemic as "A Reader's Manifesto." After the public response to the essay, it was developed into the book A Reader's Manifesto: An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness of American Literary Prose.

North Korean studies

Myers concentrates his research in the field of North Korean Studies. He claims 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 fascistic race-based nationalist state, not a Stalinist state.

Criticism

A Reader’s Manifesto has been criticized as amateurish, selective, and also insensitive to comic writing, such as the critique of consumerism in Don DeLillo’s White Noise.^[1] Han Sǒrya and North Korean Literature has been criticized as making a false argument, “the failure of socialist realism in the DPRK,” that imposes Myers’ own personal interpretation on the arts and literature doctrine the North Korean state endorses.^[2]

Politics

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

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". The Atlantic Monthly. July-August 2001.

• 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.
• "Mother of All Mothers: The Leadership Secrets of Kim Jong Il". The Atlantic Monthly. September 2004.
• "Stranger Than Fiction". The New York Times. 13 February 2005.
• "If Pigs Could Swim: Why Our Farm Animals Would Be Better Off on the Other Side of the Atlantic". The Atlantic Monthly. September 2005.
• "The Prisoner of Cool: Elmore Leonard's Talents Have Increasingly Become Cooped Up in His Hallmark Tough-Guy Aesthetic". The Atlantic Monthly. November 2005.

• "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).
• "Touch of Evil: A Selective Investigation of Recent Mysteries and Thrillers". The Atlantic Monthly. April 2006.
• "[Korean Sports] For Fans or Fanatics?" The Korea Times. 9 April 2006.
• "Kim Jong-il's Suicide Watch." The New York Times. 12 October 2006. P. A29.
• "'Concerted Front': Why Seoul Is Soft on North Korea". The Wall Street Journal. 24 December 2006.

See also

• Formalism (literature)
• Green Party (United States)
• Juche
• North Korea
• Postmodernism
• Socialist Realism

Notes

External links

• Campbell, Duncan, "Critic Savages 'Pretentious' US Literati". The Guardian. 16 Aug 2001.
• "Considering B. R. Myers" A Reader's Manifesto". Complete Review. 2.4 (Nov. 2001).
• Good, Alex. "A Reader's Manifesto: An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness of American Literary Prose by B. R. Myers". Good Reports. 6 Sept. 2002.
• Kim, Sun-Jung. "The Remarkable B. R. Myers Revealed". JoongAng Daily. 30 May 2005.
• Miller, Laura. "Sentenced to Death". Salon. 16 Aug 2001.
• O'Rourke, Meghan. "Unfair Sentence: The Case For Difficult Books". Slate. 27 Jul. 2001.
• "A Reader's Manifesto by B. R. Myers". Complete Review.
• "A Reader's Revenge". The Atlantic Monthly. 2 Oct 2002.
• Rosett, Claudia. "How Dare He! Reviled Critic Gets The Last Word". Opinion Journal. 30 Aug. 2002.
• Shulevitz, Judith. "The Close Reader; Fiction and 'Literary' Fiction". The New York Times. 9 Sept. 2001.