The Catastrophic Imagination of American Post-Apocalyptic Novel and Korean Disaster Novel

Dauk-Suhn Hong

The purpose of this study is to explore the differences of literary sensibility and worldview in two genres of American post-apocalyptic novel and Korean disaster novel, specifically by comparing two novels--Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Haeyong Pyun’s Ash and Red. Those two works are fundamentally constructed in the same roots of the post-apocalyptic thinking and catastrophic imagination, but revealing some remarkable differences on the social and existential landscapes of the disaster and the ethical perspectives for redemption. While the framework of the religious quest romance in The Road constitutes a possibility of survival and hope, its unrelenting picture of doom also questions a traditional redemptive ending. In spite of the redemptive narrative employed by the father, McCarthy repeatedly reminds the reader of the catastrophic remnant of an irrecoverable world, interrogating American identity and its redemptive mythology based on American exceptionalism. In Ash and Red, the catastrophic disaster of an epidemic is happening in the present progressive form in contrast to the post-apocalyptic setting of The Road. The main narrative of Ash and Red is a testimony of an apocalypse: a loss of humanity of the nameless protagonist from his common everyday life to a homeless outcast. His chaotic situation of fall can symbolically be interpreted as an abjection—a degradation, baseness, and meanness of humanity which inherently disturbs conventional identity. The account of an existential liminality between death and life, the victim and the victimizer, and the subject and the other, disrupts a redemption narrative, offering, in its place, a nihilistic recognition of his lost humanity.

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* 2022년 이후 발행 논문의 참고문헌은 현재 구축 중입니다.

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