Abstract

Abstract

This article extends recent debates on “self-writing” in the Korean literary field to the genre of poetry, approaching them through the framework of autotheory. The proliferation of essays and the rise of social media have encouraged self-narratives by women, queer writers, immigrants, and the ill. These developments, closely tied to discussions of literature’s ethics and performativity, have reconfigured the relations between author and text, fiction and reality, and the private and the public. In poetry, however, the discourse on self-writing has been relatively limited, often constrained by the assumption that the poet and the speaker are identical. Focusing on Kim Hyesoon’s poetry and poetics, this paper reads her practice as an early form of autotheory—a mode of writing that reconstructs poetic utterance through the female body and lived experience without collapsing it into an autobiographical “I.” Rather than simply recording a personal self, autotheory should be understood as a practice that dismantles the domain of masculine universal language through autobiographical inscription. Such practice destabilizes the boundaries between public and private, as well as between theory and autobiography. Kim’s concurrent engagement in essayistic narration and poetic theory exemplifies this mode of writing, resonating with autotheoretical experiments that gained prominence in the West from the 1980s onward. Her recent poems, which sensually render death, can likewise be read as feminist enactments of autotheory.

Abstract

This paper explores how the streamlining discourse and the automobile symbolism constructed modern disciplinary norms in colonial Korea, particularly as reflected in Jeong Ji-yong’s poem Yuseon Aesang (Streamline Melancholy). In the 1920s–30s, streamlined aesthetics circulated through transportation, consumer goods and women’s bodies, promoting fantasies of empire, masculinity, and modernity as rational ideals. The automobile, emblematic of speed and strength, reinforced the image of the ideal imperial man and positioned Koreans—and especially Korean women—as modernity’s Others. In Yuseon Aesang, the streamlined car initially appears as a modern fantasy but ends in noise and futility. Through its poetic form, the poem exposes the fictitious nature of Western civilization and modernity.

Abstract

This paper examines two films featuring the cultural icon of the so-called “national first love”—Once Upon a Time in High School: The Spirit of Jeet Kune Do (Maljukgeori Janh oksa, dir. Lee Yong-ju, 2004) and Architecture 101 (Geonchukhakgaeron, dir. Yoo Ha, 2012)—focusing on how they narrativize the failure of first love as a crucial rite of passage for “becoming a man.” Through an analysis of the basic narrative structure common to these films, this study demonstrates that they are structured around the “fall” from “sacred” heterosexual relation—spiritual and romantic—to “profane” heterosexual relation—carnal and erotic. These narratives presuppose a split of heterosexual practices that corresponds to the division of women according to the Madonna-whore dichotomy. While these films ostensibly narrate heterosexual romance, they are in fact stories about male homosocial dynamics. In this regard, this paper proposes a conceptual framework of a split structure within male homosociality that connects to the dichotomy of women and heterosexual desires: “heterosexual-desire-distributing” male homosociality and “heterosexual-desire-sharing” male homosociality. By analyzing the male characters in these films through this conceptual framework, this study argues that while the male subject becomes constituted through male homosocial relations, homosocial significations are translated into heterosexual signs; that the originary event of “becoming a man” is in fact retrospectively and retroactively imagined; and that the creation of such “translated stories of imagined origin” constitutes the very mechanism of male subjectification.

Abstract

본 연구는 영화 「검은 수녀들」에 나타나는 소수적 저항성을 규명함으로써 이분법적 세계관에 기반한 젠더 권력 구조의 문제를 비판하며 대안적 윤리의 가능성을 모색한다. 「검은 수녀들」은 「검은 사제들」의 스핀오프로서 동일한 세계관을 공유하나, 남성 사제가 중심인 「검은 사제들」과 달리 주변화된 소수자들이 주체가 되어 전통적 구마 서사를 전복한다. 또한 오컬트 장르의 문법을 비틀어 악이란 초자연적인 존재에 의한 것이 아니라 타자를 배제하는 이분법적 세계관과 그로 인한 인간의 행위라는 사실을 드러낸다. 나아가 정석으로 여겨지는 구마 예식이 실패한 문제를 혼종적이고 비정통적인 방식으로 해결하는 과정에서 주변화된 소수성이 윤리적 실천의 근거로 전환되는 모습을 보여 주며, 여성에게 부여된 부정성을 탈전유함으로써 여성 혐오의맥락을 전복하고 윤리적 실천의 근거로 전환한다. 이러한 맥락에서 「검은 수녀들」은 소수자들의 연대와 윤리적 실천이 이분법의 경계를 허무는 대안적 상상력을 제공한다는 점에서 의의를 지닌다.