Korean literature in the new millennium faces an uncertain future. While drama appears to be thriving, poetry has been slow to diversify and literary fiction struggles to maintain a readership in a publishing industry in which as many as 60 percent of the books published in a year are translations (the comparable figure in the U.S. is 3 percent). The heart and soul of the Korean literary tradition is performance, specifically song and dance, but this oral tradition (kubi munhak) survives primarily in contemporary drama and in the poetry of Kim Hyesun, the most imaginative poet in Korea today. Recorded literature (kirok munhak), growing out of the tiny percentage of the population of traditional Korea that was literate in classical Chinese, remains disproportionately influential, centered in a power structure (the mundan) consisting primarily of men with advanced degrees in Korean or other literatures, almost all of whom style themselves as literary critics (munhak p’yŏngnon’ga) rather than scholars (hakcha). Scholarship on Korean literature, whether in Korean or English, tends to focus on writers who are dead or no longer active, resulting in a plethora of studies on “representative works” (taep’yojŏgin chakp’um), which tend to be treated like museum pieces rather than living, breathing works of literature, and a corresponding paucity of studies on the literature of recent decades. In this presentation I therefore focus on the last three decades, and especially literature produced since the IMF crisis of the mid-1990s. I discuss major trends and influential figures in the genres of drama, poetry, and especially literary fiction. I conclude by suggesting that Korean literature, especially poetry and fiction, as well as the mundan in which they aresituated, need to continue to diversify if they are to remain viable, whether in Korea or abroad.