Chang Kyung-sup and The Logic of Compressed Modernity: A Review Article

Abstract

Chang Kyung-sup’s concept of “compressed modernity” is a useful and often insightful way of understanding contemporary South Korea. While a vast literature has been devoted to explaining the country’s extraordinary economic, social, and political transformation in the past few decades most of it fails to explain the anomalies that characterize South Korea. The author attempts to come up with a conceptualization of South Korea and its perpetual state of transformation that persuasively addresses the very anomalies of the country’s development and the issues that have been expressed by writers, artists, and filmmakers.