Re-Collecting Fragments: Towards a Politics of Memory in Partition Literature.

Abstract

This dissertation examines Korean partition literature—memory narratives on the national division and the Korean War—to ask how one might “blast open” the continuity of homogeneous history when the angel of history professes not to speak. Partition literature flourished in the 1970s, an era when literature emerged as the heated battleground for social and political contestations in South Korea. I explore the historical conditions of this emergence and contest the way partition literature has been historicized and gendered. Focusing on three works of fiction—Kim Wŏnil’s “Spirit of Darkness” (Ŏdum ŭi hon, 1973), Pak Wansŏ’s The Naked Tree (Namok, 1970), and Oh Junghee’s “Garden of Childhood” (Yunyŏn ŭi ttŭl, 1980)—which narrativize the lingering nightmare of division through the authors’ own traumatic childhood memories, this dissertation examines how particular histories were forced to take refuge in the literary realm of fiction. I argue that in writing fragments of their own memories, these writers politicize partition literature as the site from which to examine the past. Rather than reconstruct an originary image of the past, they seek to trace—in fragmented memories, languages, and bodies—how certain pasts are forgotten, remembered, and signified; they show the dream of a complete historical recuperation to be false. Such a reading declares a reinterpretation of Korean partition literature. Literary imaginations of partition have, for too long, been discussed solely in terms of nationalist longing and patriarchal desire. Against these views, my dissertation deploys the trope of memory to unbind the notion of the political from the logic of nationalism.