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.