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The Counter-memory aspect of the Factory girls’s Memoirs in the 1980S-Focusing on the memoirs of Seok JeongNam and Jang Namsoo

  • Chunwon Research journal
  • Abbr : Chunwon Research journal
  • 2020, (19), pp.207-242
  • DOI : 10.31809/crj.2020.12.19.207
  • Publisher : Chunwon Research Society
  • Research Area : Humanities > Korean Language and Literature > Korean Literature
  • Received : October 30, 2020
  • Accepted : December 6, 2020
  • Published : December 31, 2020

Daon Lee 1

1숭실대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the writing of factory girls and counter-memory in 1980s. Representative factory girl memoirs was appeared as a part of labor literature in the 1980s by Seok Jeong-nam and Jang Nam-soo writing. The writings of the two factory girl wirter represent the memories of female workers who worked in factories under the industrialzation period in Korea. And It is promoted government of Park Chung Hee in the 1960s and 1970s. The most important point in the writing of the two factory girl authors with such a clear identity is the aspect of counter-memory. Counter-memory is a concept emerged by Foucault by criticizing the objectivity pursued by the existing historical narrative. Such counter-memory plays a very encouraging role in that it summons the stories of various others that have been concealed and forgotten in the history of the ruling forces. The memory of the facotry girl in the writings of Seok Jeong-nam and Jang Nam-soo deviates from the form of Gong Sooni. which was regarded as a practitioner of temporary labor or assisting the family's livelihood, which was the dominant discourse in contemporary history. Their memoirs express various contexts of counter-memory that overturns the image of female workers envisioned by Korean society at the time. In other words, Seok Jeong-nam's 『Lights of the Factory』 reveals the aspect of counter-memory that converts the history of workers, which were mainly depicted with male faces in Korea, into descriptions of female subjects. It could be exercised through the problem of reproduction. For example, Song Hyo-soon's memoir “The Road to Seoul,” published in the history of formation in 1982, and led a sensational popularity, reveals the typical position of a female worker who was portrayed as a one-sided victim of the development of Korean capitalism. Therefore, the female gong's writings were considered to have great meaning in that it was a challenge and opposition to the forgotten history of the ‘a factory girl’ and the otherized subject of women. These women's memoirs faithfully fulfilled the role of literature that can confirm their own emotions and memories that cannot be explained with figures such as statistics or graphs through various contradictions and cracks inherent in them. In this article, I tried to discuss the literary value of their writing through the various aspects of counter-memory that appeared in the handwriting of the female gongs represented by Seok Jeong-nam and Jang Nam-soo.

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