한국 입양서사에 나타난 귀향과 기원 신화에 대한 재정의 제인 정 트렌카의 『덧없는 환영』

구은숙 ( Eun Sook Koo ) 국제비교한국학회 2010 비교한국학 Comparative Korean Studies Vol.18 No.3

Jane Jeong Trenka`s two autobiographies represent a Korean adoptee`s desire to go back to the place of origin and her anxiety to deal with the sense of loss, belonging and cultural identity. Her first autobiography, The Language of Blood, brings to the fore the presence of a birth mother silenced in most adoption narratives. The second autobiography, Fugitive Visions, represents the effort to reclaim what she has lost and redefine her identity as she struggles to resettle and readjust in the place of origin as a resident, not as a temporary visitor. Adoptees` desire for the return is, in a sense, a way to deal with incoherence and discontinuity which have permeated their lives. Therefore, adoptee narratives are deeply involved with the idea of roots and origin which is the essential part of identity. In portraying the experiences of returning Korean adoptees living in Seoul, Trenka remembers and mourns what was lost and reinscribes the presence of silently migrated Korean children back into Korean history. She turns a critical eye towards the ideological contradictions of Korean society and identifies with other socially marginalized people such as migrant workers and foreign brides. In presenting a growing community of Korean adoptees in Korea, she illustrates their continuous struggles to construct a new kind of kinship and community while constantly negotiating with multiple subject positions. Her narrative of return and reconstruction is an aesthetic as well as political gesture which provides them with an alternative home, kinship and sense of belonging.

아프리카계/ 아시아계 디아스포라 여성의 자서전: 조라 닐 허스턴과 제이드 스노우 왕

구은숙 ( Eun Sook Koo ) 한국현대영미소설학회 2005 현대영미소설 Vol.12 No.1

모더니티, 자본주의와 여성주체: 이디스 워튼의 『기쁨의 집』

구은숙 ( Eun Sook Koo ) 미국소설학회 2013 미국소설 Vol.20 No.1

Georg Simmel in his attempt to interpret the modern world defined modern society as a monetary society because it is in the notion of money that the modern spirit finds its most perfect expression. Edith Wharton`s The House of Mirth represents upper class society at the turn of the century New York city in which money becomes the power to define what is good and right. With the advent of capitalism, the power of the marketplace becomes the controlling logic of society and the business ethic dominates all aspects of human life. The capitalists, who lack a moral consciousness and a sense of social responsibility, hold sway over socio-cultural power. Thorstein Veblen, in The Theory of Leisure Class, analyzes the new rich class and points to conspicuous consumption as one of the key characteristics of this emergent class. Under this male dominated version of capitalism, women become a commodity to be exchanged and traded, leaving marriage as the only avenue by which women from the upper class may be successful, as they are excluded from the area of production. Women are enjoined to showcase the wealth of their husbands by decorating themselves with expensive clothes and jewelry. In other words, women`s physical beauty can be exchanged for financial security as well as social status. Wharton`s The House of Mirth deals with capitalism and female subjects in the era of modernity. The novel exposes how capitalism not only makes women hostile to their own sex through their competitive relations, but also causes men to be exploited by women seeking financial gains. Lily Bart loses her social status as a member of the leisure class and is excluded from the society due to the fraudulent rumor. She realizes that fraudulence, vanity and contradictions not only objectify but devalue women`s integrity and nobility. In the course of her social descent, she finally realizes the central truth of existence by witnessing the life built by a man`s trust and a woman`s courage. In spite of Lily`s final death which dramatizes the tragedy inherent in the capitalist society, her resistance to the temptations of business ethics demonstrates the invincible nobility of human spirit and, by doing so, Lily saves herself from the vicious circle of trade and exchange in modern world.

사랑의 배반, 트라우마 서사와 주체 형성 -토니 모리슨의『자비』

구은숙 ( Eun Sook Koo ) 한국영어영문학회 2011 영어 영문학 Vol.57 No.5

Toni Morrison`s ninth novel A Mercy delves into the colonial American history of the seventeenth century when Europeans began to migrate to the New World and when the first slaves were brought to Virginia. Morrison presents a diverse group of people such as white Europeans, an American Indian, a free black man, indentured servants, and slaves from Africa in order to explore the subjects of ownership, freedom and racism. She emphasizes the fact that most of the Europeans who came to America in the early seventeenth century were the people who were thrown out from the society such as felons, prostitutes, servants and children. By portraying how these castaways tried to settle in a new environment surrounded by unknown dangers and challenges, Morrison demystifies and reconstructs the myth of the birth of America as a nation state. In continuation of Morrison`s writings about love and the betrayal of love, her novel A Mercy explores the subjects of trauma, memory and subjectivity by choosing the topic of motherly love and its betrayal which she dealt with poignantly in Beloved. The female protagonist, Florens, is given away by her mother in partial payment of debt incurred by the owner of Florens`s mother. The traumatic memory of Florens`s separation from her mother shapes Florence`s character. She has to revisit the site of the original traumatic experiences of being given up by her mother in order to reconstruct her fragmented memory and past. The recurring dream of the traumatic incident that takes hold of Florens can be explained by the trauma theory of Freud, Cathy Caruth, Suzette Henke, and Judith Herman. The paper explores the self journey of Florens in which she faces the traumatic past and comprehends its meaning which enables her to construct her subjectivity by understanding the true meaning of being free and of owning oneself. In particular, it demonstrates how the process of writing a confession, a story about one`s history, enables one to reclaim the traumatic experience and to locate it in the narrative memory.

전쟁, 이주, 트라우마: 아시아계 글로벌 서사로서 이창래의 『항복한 자』

구은숙 ( Eunsook Koo ) 한국아메리카학회 2016 美國學論集 Vol.48 No.3

Chang-rae Lee`s novel The Surrendered is an Asian global narrative which not only thematizes globalization but also presents Asian and American characters who, displaced by the Korean War, must cross national and cultural borders around the world. The three main characters, June, Sylvie and Hector, are diasporic subjects who experience migration to multiple sites. In spite of their traumatic experiences of war and violence, they are able to find hospitality, intimacy and respite in the orphanage which provides them with Levinas` sense of home. Chang-rae Lee presents Americans migrating to Asia for both religious and military reasons, and thereby decentralizes America as the place of settlement. His novel illustrates the reciprocal nature of the interaction between Asians and Americans rather than the passive absorption of American influences by Asians. In doing so, he presents a paradigm shift in imagining the relationship between America and Asia, one which suggests a direction for world literature which aspires to represent non-Western narrative visions.

전쟁, 트라우마, 섹슈얼리티: 토니 모리슨의 『집』

구은숙(Koo Eun-Sook) 미래영어영문학회 2016 영어영문학 Vol.21 No.1

Toni Morrison's Home portrays both the trauma experienced by a Korean War veteran as well as the segregation and oppression of African Americans during the post-war American society of the 1950s. The protagonist, Frank Money, suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder after returning from Korea. Unable to come to terms with the loss of his best friends in the war, he resists returning to his hometown, Lotus, Georgia. He realizes that the racial integration that he experienced in the American army was an illusion as racial segregation and oppression continues to permeate American society at large. However, he is forced to return home because his only sister, Cee, falls deathly ill due to a white doctor's botched gynecological experimentation. The novel delineates the process in which the psychologically fragmented Frank reconstructs the memory of his deprived childhood, the loss of parental love, and the atrocious violence that he both witnessed and committed during the war. At the center of his painful memory are his feelings of guilt for killing a Korean girl who aroused his sexual desire. By acknowledging his wrongdoing in the war, he is able to recover from his psychological fragmentation and suffering, and thereby become a moral and ethical subject.

공간 이동, 근대 체험과 여성 정체성 형성 : 김난영의 『토담』

구은숙 ( Eun Sook Koo ) 韓國아메리카學會 2008 美國學論集 Vol.40 No.2

한국전쟁 포로의 브라질 이주와 환대의 윤리학

구은숙(Koo, Eunsook) 미래영어영문학회 2017 영어영문학 Vol.22 No.1

Paul Yoon"s Snow Hunters suggests a new direction for Asian American literature by including Brazil as one of the migratory routes for Asian diasporas. The novel delineates the journey of a North Korean prisoner of the war who chooses Brazil as a place to settle down after the Korean War. The novel is unique in that it introduces a character, Yohan, who migrates to Brazil after the war and makes a living with the help of a Japanese tailor, Kiyoshi. The welcoming of the other represented by Kiyoshi can be explicated by Derrida"s concept of hospitality as well as Levinas" sense of ethics. Yohan is able to develop a sense of kinship with various social outsiders including the groundkeeper at the church and two vagrant children. While living among outsiders of Brazilian society, he continues to carry traumatic memories of the Korean War within himself. The paper illustrates the process by which he is freed from the hold of traumatic memories and is able to construct an affective relationship in which he can find a sense of home.

Mimicry and Subversion in Korean American Spy/Detective Novels: Chang-rae Lee`s Native Speaker and Leonard Chang`s Over the Shoulder

구은숙 ( Eun Sook Koo ) 한국현대영미소설학회 2008 현대영미소설 Vol.15 No.1

전쟁과 여성: 젠더화된 폭력과 군사주의 문화

구은숙 ( Eun Sook Koo ) 한국아메리카학회 2009 美國學論集 Vol.41 No.3

Rey Chow defines war in the 21century not as the cessation of normality but the very definition of normality itself. With the deluge of war images delivered through the media, war has become an unavoidable and structural part of our unconsciousness as well as of everyday life. She argues that the consumption of war and violence is "on a par with our consumption of various forms of merchandise." Since Samuel Huntington contended that the absence of a clearly defined enemy against which to consolidate the nation resulted in the failure to maintaining America`s unity, America has constantly invented opposing others within and without its national boundaries, Through the production of knowledge and dichotomizing logic which demonizes the alien others, American war against Afghanistan and terror was justified as the war to defend democracy and freedom throughout the world. Emmanuel Levinas states that underlying the potentiality of war and violence lies racism, constructed upon the fantasy of the others. In spite of the fact that the majority of war victims have been women, gender has not been regarded to be a relevant issue in the studies on war which were conducted in the fields of international relations, history, political science and sociology, However, towards the end of 1980s, gender entered the discussion of war with the influence of feminist theory and practice, The experiences of war are gendered as men and women participate in wars with different roles and duties imposed upon them, As women become participants of war in various capacities such as mothers, sweethearts, nurses, prostitutes and workers in military industries, they become sometimes complicit agents of war or resistance demonstrators against war. Liberal feminism and difference feminism therefore take the different positions about war, the former argues for women`s equal participation in war while the latter maintains that men are innately more violent than women and that women are more peace loving. This paper intends to look at interlocking relations between gender and militarism as military culture and experiences play the key role in the construction of gendered subjects as militarism permeates in our everyday livers. It also brings the racial, ethnic and class relations in to the discussion of gendered war experiences by showing how their interplay is crucial in the construction of wars. Furthermore, it demonstrates how the violence of war is inextricably intertwined with domestic sexual violence under patriarchy. It also emphasizes the fact that sexism is continuously maintained and fortified by the culture of war and that gendered violence against women during the war time intensifies the subjugation of women. Since these issues are part of global problem rather than a disparate local ones, women`s networking to fight against war and to promote peace throughout the world has become an urgent task.