korean literature essay

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World Studies

Korean Culture

Korean literature term paper.

North American literature of the 20th century was predominantly white male-dominated, with works by authors like Faulkner, Hemingway, and Dreiser reflecting their experiences and world views. Post World War II, diverse voices emerged, with authors like Kingston, Morrison, and Baldwin expressing the theme of alienation through their works.

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Korean Literature Lee Mun-Yeol, Voice of Korea in the Literary Age of Transition. A thematic approach to a study of two of his stories: "The Old Hatter" and "An Appointment with his Brother." student of literature who finds interest in fiction's historical settings gets inveigled into the stark realities of war and conquest, its horrifying and insidious effects on the lives of innocent people caught helplessly in its clutches - the pain , the hunger , the loss of lives of loved ones. The reader gets the autobiographical drift of Lee's two stories - he was there when all those things he writes about happened. In "An appointment with his Brother," as the oldest son by his father's first family, he knew what it was to be abandoned by his father and to be cared for and brought up by a youthful mother . Yet there is no bitterness in the tone of his writing. There was only acceptance of what had to be - a father leaving his family to seek greener pastures and the unavoidable exigencies of war and occupation. The father had to endure the ignommy of working as a civil engineer in North Korea when he was a professor of economics . The eldest son understood what the father had to endure under the communist occupation in South Korea - changes in the North Korean society , the loss of the old values so prized by the older generation but still kept and adhered to by the remaining members of the family. The eldest son for instance would still observe the tradition of honoring the memory of the departed father and other departed ancestors and he being the oldest son would lead in the complicated ceremonies. There were many values the younger brother and most likely the younger generations, would not understand at all but to his credit, the younger brother tried to understand. At one point when the eldest son and the younger brother were commemorating the memory of the dead father, the oldest son started crying. He thought he was crying because of his father's failure but he soon realized that he was crying "for himself." He cried for the "miseries and pains of my past for which no possibility of compensation of any kind remained, and I wept for my spirit which became distorted in the process of my struggle for survival, while I vowed to stay alive until 'that day.' The writer shudders at the accusations hurled at him by the "grassroots" and "nationalist" historians believing he had exchanged the old world values for the new ones. The writer and his wife had acquired new properties but they were modest ones which they had bought with loans and hard earnings. When the oldest son ended the ceremony for the dead he offered the remaining wine and food to the younger brother and they started discussing the hills planted to chestnuts. The fact the younger brother knew about the back hills of his father's hometown warmed the eldest son's heart. Love and reverence for their country of birth is very evident in the words of the two brothers - the oldest brother defending South Korea and the changes that have taken place there; the younger brother defending North Korea and even its cache of nuclear weapons. Obviously both brothers have received divergent orientations - the eldest brother fiercely clinging to old values, customs and rites; the younger brother, a product of the new generation of Koreans, outgoing, open-minded, keeping their eyes open to what would bring progress, wealth and security to their country. A find the story "The Old Hatter" sad and disconcerting. Why should the old hatter stick to an occupation - the business of making hats out of horse hair when they're no longer in vogue, when people don't wear them anymore? One realized that while it may seem illogical and unrealistic, the old would obstinately stick to what to them were important - the national heritage, the old customs, traditions, values - the old They paid in money and in the lashes they got when they were caught. A lesson learned here is that the glory of the past is being sucked into the modern world and what have you got to show for it? Everything changes - even time-honored traditions but what is most disheartening is the loss of the spiritual heritage that had inspired and sustained the members of the writer's clan. What the writer decries most is the decline of old learning - the teaching of Confucuis, and of Buddhist teachers. What about the old morality? Lee says it went the way of the old learning. Morality was not as intensely practised as it used to be before. People now think nothing of public display of affection. Modernity now holds sway - fashion has changed the way the young dress while walking on the streets arm in arm, laughing and giggling without regard to the onlookers' obvious disapproval. Love of country or friend are offset by personal selfishness. Codes on relationships between clanmen are now disregarded. What Korea has now are common interest groups; loyalty to the clan and close clan solidarity is no longer existent. Respect and reverence for ancestors and the elders are on the wane. The spirit of the dead who are the sole protectors of the living ignored. Even the old myths, legends and creations of the old which used to delight the minds of children are now discredited by scientific explanations. The writer laments the disappearance of the old religion. Heaven may be silent but still answers the prayers of honest men. It is therefore important to obey the will of Heaven and to abide by the laws of nature . Now, sad to say, this old religion has vanished together with the many deities who stood as our guardians. The marketplace, a magnificent symbol of old Korea has disappeared. The blind fortuneteller now has but a few customers. The place of the geomancer is filled with dust. The churchbell still rings every Sunday but it now tolls the death knell to the beautiful heritage that has passed away. The old hatter's shop remains untouched. The old man continues to ply, his old trade despite constant losses. How does the old hatter continue to do business? It was a constant battle against poverty and change. In the final analysis, it did not seem so ridiculous a situation anymore. We now see the old and the new from a different perspective. We see in the old man the fate of the writer's clan as it was slowly being sucked by history . The old man in the end became a living symbol of all that has vanished, his words an epitaph in a "dead language in the ruins of a dead city." He lived on by selling every piece of property he owned. His shop was his last bulwark and he leaned on to it for strength. Finally when there was no hope for his horse hair hat business, he sold his last remaining property and left in search of "the blue bamboo." When he returned with the idea that there's no blue bamboo, he set about preparing one with silk thread. The finished priceless hat would be for the last man wearing horsehair hat but this last man died before he could finish the hat. He finished the hat to give to a man who had shorn off his hair. He realized that the hat belonged to the man he truly believed to be deserving - but that man lay in a grave. So he laid the hat on a pile of dead leaves and burnt it. He entered his home and never left it until one day he just died. His daughter sold his shop and never came back again. The Old Hatter is the eternal symbol of the death and passing away of everything we holds most precious in life. This in essence is what the two stories of Lee are trying to make us feel and mull over. In succinctly beautiful words he paints graphic pictures of people, places, things and events in Korea. He is most effective in contrasting North and South Korea, its forces and polices as they affected the residents, the old and the young. The propensity for conservatism is evident. Like any man past his fifties he displayed dismay and disapproval over countrymen touring Beijing and, other places in China or Korea acting like westerners wearing tight-fitting pants or culottes, cameras slung on their necks. There was disdain in his attitude as he refused to meet them or talk to them as he would in the past. There is a somber touch in his two stories born of regret at what division had done to Korea - dividing not only land and country but also…

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[Essay] Words That Bestow Life: In Honor of Han Kang’s 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature

by Kyung Hee Youn Translated by Min Eun Kyung November 22, 2024

English Korean

Here, in offering these remarks on Han Kang’s 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature, I speak not as a critic so much as a contemporary reader of her works. Distanced from both the writer she writes about and the reader who reads her criticism, the critic tosses her gaze down at both. Her language moves in one direction; her critical utterance expresses her superior specialist knowledge about the writer. The contemporary reader, on the other hand, dwells communally among unknown fellow readers in that imaginative space built by the books of their time. Those who cohabitate in this space of contemporary literature are linked together by chance encounters, candid admissions, and the desire to touch one another by sharing the writers and books they love best. In this safe space they may exchange without embarrassment their most intimate feelings about or most trivial experiences with a book.

On Thursday, October 10, 2024, I was in a meeting with several other people. While paying due attention to the serious discussion taking place around the table, I nonetheless found a part of myself wandering off, wondering who would receive this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature. Had I been among my literary cohort, we surely would have made a festive time of the moments before the announcement. These literary friends of mine—oddballs who do not hesitate to buy piles of books, no matter how old or new, that they proceed to stack on shelves already filled to overflowing, and to read with mad delight—had already placed their bets on their favorite authors: Can Xue, Yoko Tawada, Anne Carson, Ali Smith, and Margaret Atwood. But on October 10, I was not among them. At eight o’clock sharp, curiosity got the better of me. I quietly reached for the cellphone in my bag to check the news. And when I did, my heart stopped. The news that I had been so certain would arrive one day was already in my hands.

On the way back home that night, I felt gravity had lost its pull; my heart was bursting, my head reeling. Over the next few days, this feeling of weightlessness persisted, even as I exchanged words of joy with my literary friends, students, and fellow writers. “Our beloved writer has won a great prize.” “What great happiness.” “We must celebrate together.” Why is it, then, that even as we congratulated each other in that moment of indubitable, heartstopping joy, we found ourselves strangely unable to laugh out loud? Why did our voices falter? And why did we turn our damp eyes away from each other’s gaze?

It was only later, during a phone conversation with a friend I had not talked to lately, that the tears finally came. It happens that way sometimes. Some kinds of happiness do not evoke laughter but rather a complex, cathartic grief. At times, it is flowing tears that can best express the happiness we feel. I know there were others beside me who, caught in feelings too difficult to express, also found themselves in tears after the announcement. “I burst out crying when I heard.” “I cried, too.” “The moment it was announced, we all cried. We were hugging one another and crying.”

The reason we embraced and wept is because, for some years now, even decades, we have been suffering. Budgets for books, publishing, and culture have been slashed. People working in the cultural sphere are fast losing the means to foster creative knowledge and critical thinking. Both online and offline, discrimination and crimes of hate are greatly on the rise, leaving women, disabled persons, the elderly, children, teens, and LGBTQ people increasingly at risk. Those who ceaselessly deny and distort the history of state violence have turned to stigmatizing the victims and their bereaved families rather than consoling them and offering reparation. In recent years, we have lost both the eager spirit and the material means to forge a better today and a better tomorrow. One by one, we have sunk into silence and isolation, hurt by words and images of hate, cynicism, lethargy, and base vulgarity.

So the tears that sprang from our eyes when we heard that Han Kang had won the Nobel Prize in Literature were not tears of national pride. We did not weep because our national literature finally had arrived at a level we had been long aiming for, or because we finally had received the international recognition we deserved. Rather, we wept because we remembered literature had kept us company through all those brutal and violent years, giving us the strength to continue living—literature that faithfully pieced together historical truth, literature that kept beauty and dignity alive. We wept because we, who are so worn out and weary of words of hate and violence, know that there are words that bestow life rather than death. We wept that these words had been given to us as a gift. The joy that bursts from the wellsprings of a deeply repressed pain must sound like a cry rather than laughter. Think of the first sounds that emerge from the newly born baby embracing the world and expressing the sensation of life with all its body. Think of that stupendous cry.

This is why we do not hesitate to say the news of Han’s Nobel award must have given new life to someone wasting away, depleted and alone, in some unobserved corner of the world. In Han’s writings, we often come across this theme of a human being deprived of bodily function, language, and willpower, being pushed to the utmost limit of existence. In that very moment when the human being in extremis reaches this limit, a powerful life force reasserts itself. This is why, in those moments when I feel most depleted of energy, the following passage from Han’s early short story “Evening Light” comes back to me. It is a passage that occurs at the very end of the story.

A darkness both of sky and earth, heavy as a boulder, was crushing Jaein’s body. His flesh rumpled. His spine wilted. His collarbone, rib cage, knee joints and talus bones came crumbling down in one heap with a loud clatter like tumbling wooden blocks. His muscles and innards burst furiously in all directions into the air.

This is a story about two young half-brothers. The older brother, a painter, lives alone by the sea. One day, he boards a fishing boat and is lost at sea. Jaein arrives at the shore just as the sun is sinking beneath the sea that has swallowed his half-brother. He pours libations into the sea. Soon after this gesture of mourning, his body undergoes a startling transformation. The onslaught of darkness takes on formidable, supernatural power as it presses down upon the small, fragile body of a grieving human being. The scene is too fantastic to be real, yet is narrated with such anatomical precision that we cannot brush it off as mere illusion. Step by step, with cool accuracy, the narrator depicts the body crumbling down. It is as if Jaein’s body, for unknown reasons, is shattered before the narrator who watches with unflinching eyes. In this scene, Jaein is destroyed as an individual, but he joins the vast flows of life energy operating at planetary and cosmic levels. This deserves to be called a metamorphosis beyond the realm of death into another dimension of life.

Han’s novels narrate such moments of transformation when a human being, confronted with the final paralysis of death, manages to rekindle the will to live by tapping into an inner strength, or comes face to face with an overwhelming life force. The waves of energy circulating between word and word, sentence and sentence, page and page, reach out and touch the reader. The reader’s body accepts and absorbs the bursts of life energy emanating from Han’s works. The reader is shaken and shattered by her powerful language, yet through this very process, is reborn.

In Han’s work it is not only the individual that passes through death to reach a new life. The human community, too, survives destructive violence to arrive at a new existence. Her works do not merely testify to the continuing human cost of political violence in modern Korean history. They confer dignity on the dead and enact consolation. In Human Acts , Han wrote about the Gwangju Democratic Uprising of May 1980, a democratic struggle against the military dictatorship, in which many civilians lost their lives. In We Do Not Part , she testified to the state violence perpetrated against the people of Jeju Island in 1947-1954. Han’s writings, based on meticulous archival research, interviews with survivors and their families, and visits to the sites in question, vividly represent such locations of violence. Her work dignifies those who were willing to lay down their lives as well as those who were innocently sacrificed. Her semi-autobiographical The White Book , set in Warsaw, similarly remembers and commemorates a dark moment in Polish history. During a brief sojourn in this city, which was almost completely razed to the ground by the Nazis after the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, the narrator repeatedly comes face to face with the sight of new walls raised above the preserved ruins of the old. These walls built on the fragments of the bombed-out walls of the past testify to the deliberate choice made by the people of Warsaw not to erase the traces of past violence. Instead of forgetting, they chose simultaneously to preserve and reconstruct.

This is an image—and a lesson—the narrator takes home with her. The acts of mourning and reconstruction are the means by which human beings who have experienced near annihilation hold fast to life and history. The writer performs these acts through writing. By reading Han Kang’s works, we share in the work of honoring the dead. And we gain the strength to continue our lives in their wake.

Translated by Min Eun Kyung

Kyung Hee Youn is an author, translator, and literary critic. She has written Wunderkammer (2021) and Shadows and Dawn (2022), and translated Anne Carson’s Nox into Korean. She teaches at Korea National University of Arts.

삶을 다시 살게 하는 말:

한강의 노벨문학상 수상을 축하하며.

한강의 노벨문학상 수상에 대해 나는 평론가가 아니라 동시대 독자의 위치에서 말하고 싶다. 평론가의 시선은 대상과 청자에게서 거리를 두고 둘을 위에서 아래로 내려다보며, 그의 발화는 대상에 대한 자기의 지식을 청자에게 일방적으로 전달하는 위계적 방식으로 구성된다. 반면, 동시대 독자는 당대에 출간된 책들로 지어진 상상적인 언어 환경 안에서 미지의 동료 독자들과 함께 기거한다. 동시대 문학의 환경 안에 공생하는 자들 사이에는 거리와 위계 대신 우연한 마주침, 솔직한 터놓음, 좋아하는 작가와 책으로 상대방을 유혹하려는 욕망과 기술이 생겨난다. 이곳에서는 텍스트의 분석과 설명 외에 책에서 촉발된 가장 내밀한 감정과 거의 무의미하도록 사소한 일화를 주고받는 게 전혀 부끄러운 일이 아니다.

2024년 10월 10일 목요일 저녁 나는 여러 사람과 함께하는 번잡한 일에 얽매여 있었다. 테이블에서 오가는 진지한 대화에 주의를 기울이면서도, 머릿속 한편으로는 올해의 노벨문학상은 누구에게 수여될지 궁금해하고 있었다. 내게는 여러 책 한꺼번에 사들이기, 책꽂이 넘치게 쌓아두기, 고전과 신간을 가리지 않고 남독하기에 미친 듯한 열정을 쏟아붓는, 오늘날 희귀한 인간 유형에 속하는 친구들 무리가 있는데, 이들은 진작에 찬쉐, 다와다 요코, 앤 카슨, 앨리 스미스, 마거릿 애트우드 등 각자 소망하는 후보를 꼽아둔 터였다. 하지만 이날의 합석자들은 기대와 경쟁심이 뒤섞여 들뜬 축제적 기분을 서로 북돋고 공유할 만한 사람들은 아니었다. 8시 정각, 호기심을 억누를 수 없어, 가방 안쪽에서 몰래 핸드폰을 켜고 뉴스를 확인했을 때, 내 숨은 잠시 멈추었다. 수년 내로 반드시 들려오리라 확신했던 소식이 눈앞에 벌써 도착해 있었다.

집으로 돌아오는 밤길, 벅참 못지않은 얼떨떨함으로 발걸음에 거의 중력이 느껴지지 않았다. 이 이상한 망연함은 독서 애호가 친구들, 수업 중의 학생들, 문학계의 지인들과 기쁨을 나누는 며칠 동안에도 지속되었다. 우리가 사랑하는 작가가 큰 상을 탔어. 너무나 기쁜 사건이죠. 다 같이 축하해요. 그런데 이상하다, 이 감정은 분명 크나큰 기쁨인데, 왜 그에 걸맞게 크나큰 웃음으로 즉시 터져 나오지 않는 것일까. 왜 우리 중 몇몇은 기쁨의 인사를 나누면서도 목소리가 평소보다 더 낮게 잠기는 것일까. 왜 눈가에는 어쩐지 물기가 서려 어색하게 시선을 피하게 되는 것일까.

그러다, 한 친구와 오랜만에 전화로 목소리를 들으며 다시금 기쁨을 나누다가, 나는 마침내 저항 없이 눈물을 터뜨렸다. 그런 것이었다. 어떤 기쁜 사건은 순진무구한 웃음보다 훨씬 강력하고 복합적인 울음의 카타르시스를 유발한다. 거듭 솟구치는 눈물이야말로 그 특정한 사건으로 생겨난 기쁨을 표현하는 가장 적합한 형식일 수 있다. 한강의 노벨문학상 수상 소식에 나 외에도 웃음보다는 눈물로 무어라 형언하기 어려운 감정을 표출한 사람들이 적지 않다. 나는 갑자기 울음이 나왔어. 나도 울었어. 발표되는 순간, 같이 있었던 사람들 다 울었어. 껴안고 울었어.

우리가 눈물과 포옹을 나눈 이유는, 최근 몇 년 동안, 더 길게는 수십 년 동안, 우리가 부당한 비참함을 겪고 있기 때문이다. 도서, 출판, 문화 관련 예산이 대폭 삭감되었고, 그 결과로 문화계에 종사하는 사람들은 시민 사회 안에 창의적 지식과 비판적 사유를 순환시킬 의지와 방법을 급격히 잃어버리고 있다. 온라인과 오프라인을 막론하고 여성, 장애인, 노인, 아동 청소년, 노동자, 성소수자 같은 약자에 대한 차별이 노골적으로 조장됨에 따라, 혐오 범죄에 목숨을 잃거나 생존을 위협받는 사람들이 부쩍 늘었다. 국가 폭력의 역사를 왜곡하고 부인하는 무리와 미디어가 득세하면서, 폭력의 희생자와 유가족들에게 공공연히 낙인을 찍는 행위가 묵인되기도 한다. 불과 몇 년 사이에, 우리는 더 나은 현재와 미래를 만들려는 활력과 물질적 수단을 박탈당하고, 혐오, 냉소, 무기력, 저열함의 말과 이미지에 시달리며 하나둘씩 말 없는 고립 상태에 빠져들어 갔다.

우리가 한강의 노벨문학상 수상에 북받쳐 눈물 흘리는 까닭은, 그러므로, 한국어 문학이 어떤 수준에 도달했다는 목표지향적 성취감과 무관하고, 세계적 권위로부터 인정받았다는 민족주의적 자긍심 때문도 아니다. 그보다는, 역사의 진실을 엄정하게 재구성하며 아름다움과 존엄을 굳세게 지지하는 글쓰기와 이야기 덕분에, 우리 곁 그것의 존재를 상기하면서, 저열하고 폭력적인 현시대 한국에서 우리는 조금이나마 다시 삶을 지속할 힘을 얻었기 때문이다. 우리는 지금 혐오하고 살해하는 말들에 너무나 지쳤고 괴로워하는데, 어떤 말과 이야기에는 살리는 힘이 있어서, 수상 소식을 들으며 새삼 그것을 확인하고 선물 받았기 때문이다. 깊게 억누른 고통 속에서 솟아나는 갱생의 기쁨은 웃음보다 더 강렬하고 뜨거운 울음으로 터져 나올 수밖에 없다. 갓 태어난 아기가 온몸으로 세계를 받아들이며 생의 감각을 표출할 때, 그 첫 목소리는 웃음이 아니라 커다란 울음이듯, 그렇게.

아무런 과장 없이, 우리는 이 소식이 잘 눈에 띄지 않는 곳에서 홀로 소진되어 죽어가던 사람들을 되살렸다고 믿는다. 그런데 신체 기능, 감각, 언어, 의욕 등을 상실한 사람이 어떤 극한에 이른 순간 강렬한 삶의 기운을 회복하는 사건은 한강의 글쓰기에서 30여 년 동안 일관적으로 변주되는 테마이기도 하다. 예를 들어, 내가 가장 좋아하는, 삶의 동력이 고갈되었다고 생각될 때마다 다시 찾는, 한강의 문장은 아래와 같다.

하늘에서도, 땅에서도 거대한 바윗돌 같은 어둠이 재인의 몸을 조여오고 있었다. 살이 뭉개어졌다. 등뼈가 오그라들었다. 쇄골이, 갈비뼈가, 무릎과 복숭아뼈가 일제히 우둑우둑 소리를 내며 주저앉았다. 모든 근육과 내장들이 성내며 사방으로 튕겨져나갔다.

1990년대 초반에 발표한 단편소설 「저녁빛」의 마지막 부분이다. 젊은 형제가 있다. 형은 바닷가에서 홀로 그림을 그리며 지내다가, 어느날, 고깃배를 타고 나가 실종된다. 배다른 동생은 형이 사라진 서녘 바닷가에 이르러 애도의 술을 흩뿌린다. 곧이어, 위와 같이, 광막한 어둠이 비탄(grief)에 잠긴 한 인간의 작고 연약한 몸을 압박하여 파열시키는, 무시무시한 초자연적 현상이 발생한다. 이는 현실이라 간주하기에는 당연히 불가능하지만, 그저 환상이라 치부하기에는 해부학적 명칭들이 지나치게 구체적이고, 신체가 파열하는 순서는 냉혹하도록 체계적이다. 마치 재인의 몸이 원인불명으로 실제로 갑자기 부서지고 있고, 서술자는 이 현상을 엄정하게 관찰하는 것 같은 것이다. 여기서 재인은 한 개체로서는 파괴되지만, 행성과 우주의 수준에서 작용하는 크나큰 생의 에너지와 합체한다. 이는 죽음을 넘어선 더 높은 차원의 변신이라 할 만하다.

한강의 소설은 바로 이 순간, 마비적 죽음에 근접한 인간이 자기 안에서 삶의 의지를 다시 불피우거나 외부에서 엄청난 위력의 생의 에너지를 맞닥뜨리는 순간을 부드러우면서도 역동적인 언어로 이야기한다. 독자는 말과 말, 문장과 문장, 페이지와 페이지에 유연하게 넘실거리는 에너지를 전달받는다. 소설에서 뿜어져 나오는 생의 기운을 자기 몸 안에 받아들인다. 강력한 문학의 언어로 인해 흔들리고 부서지는 듯한 충격을 받지만, 동시에, 그것 덕분에 새 몸으로 태어나 다시 사는 듯 느낀다. 위에 인용한 문장들에서 바로 그러하듯, 이는 문학의 독자가 겪는 환상이자 엄연한 사실이다.

한강의 소설에서 죽음을 통과하여 다시 얻는 삶은 개인의 차원에서만 달성되지 않는다. 인간 공동체 역시 대규모의 파괴적 폭력을 겪더라도 갱생할 수 있다. 『소년이 온다』(2014)는 1980년 5월 광주에서 군부 세력이 자행한 학살과 시민들의 저항적 민주화 운동을, 그리고 『작별하지 않는다』(2021)는 1947-1954년 제주에서 미군정과 한국 정부가 주민들을 불순 세력으로 몰아 학살한 국가 폭력 사건을 21세기의 우리 눈앞에 불러낸다. 한강의 글쓰기는 치밀한 아카이브 조사, 생존자와 유가족 인터뷰, 여러 차례의 답사를 통해 당시의 무참한 현장을 생생하게 재현하면서, 나아가, 공동체의 신념을 지키기 위해 죽음을 무릅쓰고 저항한 사람들과 아무 죄 없이 희생된 사람들의 존엄을 회복시킨다. 『흰』(2016)에서 폴란드 바르샤바의 역사에 대해 언급할 때도 마찬가지이다. 바르샤바는 1944년 가을 나치에 저항하여 봉기를 일으켰으나 대공습으로 파괴된 기억을 간직한 도시이다. 이곳에서 잠시 체류하는 동안, 작가는 부서진 벽의 그루터기 위에 새로 쌓은 벽을 곳곳에서 발견하면서, 바르샤바 시민들이 과거의 비극적 폭력이 남긴 흔적을 완전히 삭제하는 대신 애도와 재건을 동시에 행하는 법을 배운다. 애도와 재건은 인간이 거의 절멸에 이르는 폭력을 겪은 이후에도 삶과 역사를 지속시키기 위한 방법으로써, 작가는 그것을 글쓰기로 행한다. 그리고 우리는 한강의 글쓰기를 읽으면서 죽음에 예의를 다하는 일에 동참하고 이후의 삶을 계속 살아낼 힘을 얻는 것이다.

윤경희 KYUNG HEE YOUN

문학평론가, 한국예술종합학교 강사. 산문집 <분더카머>와 <그림자와 새벽>을 출간했고, 앤 카슨의 <녹스>를 한국어로 옮겼다.

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Korean Literature: Authors, Novels, and Cultural Reflections

Korean literature is a treasure trove of rich storytelling, intricate characters, and profound cultural reflections. It's a literary tradition that has captivated readers for centuries, offering a glimpse into the soul of Korea and its people. In this blog, we embark on a literary journey through the world of Korean literature, exploring notable authors, iconic novels, and the cultural tapestry woven into the pages of these timeless works.

Authors who Shaped Korean Literature

Hwang Sok-yong

Iconic Novels that Define Korean Literature

"the three-body problem" by cixin liu.

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While not originally Korean, this Chinese science fiction masterpiece has gained popularity in Korea and showcases the global reach of Korean literature. Its themes of science, ethics, and human nature resonate deeply with Korean readers.

"Please Look After Mom" by Kyung-sook Shin

This emotionally charged novel is a poignant exploration of family, identity, and memory. It follows the journey of a family searching for their missing mother and offers profound insights into the Korean concept of motherhood.

"Pachinko" by Min Jin Lee

This epic multi-generational saga tells the story of a Korean family living in Japan. "Pachinko" delves into themes of identity, discrimination, and the pursuit of the Korean dream in a foreign land.

Cultural Reflections in Korean Literature

Korean literature is a mirror reflecting the culture, history, and societal changes of Korea. From the enduring influence of Confucianism to the impact of modernization and globalization, these novels offer insights into the Korean psyche. They explore themes like family, identity, the pursuit of success, and the enduring ties to tradition.

Korean literature also provides a window into the complex relationship between North and South Korea. Works like "The Accusation" by Bandi, written secretly in North Korea, give voice to the silenced experiences of those living under the regime.

Exploring the Depths of Korean Literature

Korean literature is a vibrant tapestry of stories that resonate on a universal level while retaining a distinct Korean flavor. Through the words of authors like Yi Mun-yol, Han Kang, and Hwang Sok-yong, we gain insight into the cultural and historical nuances that shape Korean society. Iconic novels like "The Vegetarian," "The Guest," and "Please Look After Mom" invite us to ponder the universal themes of identity, family, and the human experience.

As you embark on your literary journey through Korean literature, you'll find a treasure trove of narratives that not only captivate the mind but also touch the heart and soul, inviting you to explore the rich tapestry of Korean culture and society.

Author: Annalisa

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