By providing self-awareness that personal suffering of leading characters is the pain of group of a great many people, novel literature presents such a catharsis as self-identification. In addition, by increasing macro-insight into problematic situati...
By providing self-awareness that personal suffering of leading characters is the pain of group of a great many people, novel literature presents such a catharsis as self-identification. In addition, by increasing macro-insight into problematic situations, it reinforces the power of agreement and overcoming, and of understanding and forgiveness. Although listening to a grandmother narrating an old story at a dark night is dismissed as an old memory in the period of analogue, numberless fairy tale books replace it endlessly, and practicability imposes an unlimited speed, the increase of applicants to literary awards, such as annual spring literary contests, proves the power and healing function of novels.
In this vein, this study examined the power and literary value of story, the current status of domestic literary healing, and the healing effects of the universality of epic, via the example of descriptive shaman music <Baridegi>, one of archetypal stories. In addition, by suggesting ‘autobiographic novel-writing’ as a method of a more profound self-healing, this study looked into the healing function of autobiographic novel-writing, focusing on attached works, created with such motifs of <Baridegi> as child-abandoning consciousness and desire.
Autobiographic novel-writing exactly accords with the directing points of literary healing, such as correlations between confessing and health; internal healing through suppression, transference and sublimation; catharsis and self-examination; improvement of self-respect and achievement; and the power of communication that heals writers, readers and novelistic characters.
As a work that projects national tragedy of Korea on the world, by comprising Korean War, namely a tragedy in the modern history of Korea, Vietnamese War and Iraqi War, and expands the tragedy to the consciousness of antiwar, <A Stray Bullet> depicts war-caused psychological trauma and war orphans’ agony. Like the works of Park Wan-seo and Kim Yong-seong, <A Stray Bullet> confirms the healing function of novels from the aspect of forming the bond of sympathy that the theme of war is a group wound shared by war-experienced generations across the ages and in all countries of the world. In addition it corrects viewpoints of war and achieves the expansion of perception of history and world.
In <My Lovely Jully>, leading character’s language colonization phenomenon is contrasted with the pain of Kurd youth Ahzahd. Their pains seem to be a changed modality that archetypal epic’s physiological consciousness of child-abandoning, derived from the fact that Baridegi was abandoned, makes nations and people who did not defend an independent system against Europe-centered world order in the process of modernization have psychological abandoning consciousness.
In particular, from <My Lovely Jully>, such a healing effect of novels as achieving a self-identification phenomenon among such 3 parties as a writer, a novelistic leading character and readers, based on the formation of the bond of sympathy, is confirmed.
Expanding institutional literary instruction and making people carry out profound examination on self and world, based on the method of literary healing, namely ‘autobiographic novel-writing, seem to be a shortcut to maximize/activate the healing function of novels, overcome the crisis of literature, narrow the distance between the masses and literature, and correct the position of literature which has magnificent values.