This dissertation examines novels reflecting the experience of the Korean War with a view to defining the historical forms of subjectivity which emerged as a result of the experience of war. As long as the regime of division remains, the Korean War co...
This dissertation examines novels reflecting the experience of the Korean War with a view to defining the historical forms of subjectivity which emerged as a result of the experience of war. As long as the regime of division remains, the Korean War could be said to constitute the existential basis which effects the lives of all Koreans in some way Yet the Korean War does not hold the same meaning for all people; rather the meaning of the war is intimately related to individual positionalities.
Through the differences in these individual positions towards the war, we can make some suppositions about position and status within the division regime, and about the world and historical views held by people.
This dissertation pursues the traces the Korean War left among Korean people through an examination of literary texts, and aims not merely to reconsider the suffering, regret and tragic wounds which the war left behind, but to question whether Koreans have really freed themselves from the wounds and traces of war. We have no choice but to reconsider the meaning of the Korean War if we are to ask questions of our own identity.
Through examines the works of Hwang Sunweon this dissertation argues that they reveal the typical structure through which the consciousness of suffering produced by the war experience expands from the concept of the self to a concept of the race nation (minjok). In addition, Hwang Sunweon reveal the meaning the war may have for writers who fled to the south from the north. Hwang Sunweon and the writers who fled to the south from the north understand the war and division as an experience of suffering based on a consciousness of the loss of the homeland, and in both of their works this consciousness develops into a yearning for roots.
One historical characteristic of subjectivity constituted through the experience of the Korean War is how it uses the field of literature as a substitute to alleviate the suffering of war and to isolate the memory of the dead (or of death) which threatens those who survive and also enacts a kind of ritual of rebirth which purifies the self that has been negated (through an ambivalent process of memory and burial).