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‘Gwangju’ unceasingly summoned - Based on Yeosun Kwon’s Legato (2012) and Gang Han’s Here comes a boy (2014)

Yeonjung Cho 1

1서울대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

Continuous publication of novels regarding ‘Gwangju’, which has been a phenomenon for the past few years, can be analyzed in connection with the political crisis in Korea. This thesis analyzes Legato (2012) by Kwon Yeosun and Here comes a boy (2014) by Han Gang which call for Gwangju Uprising as an important force in narrative, and aims to explore the way that enables bringing ‘Gwangju Uprising’, which has not been finished yet, to the present. ‘Gwangju’ in Kwon Yeosun’s Legato functions as an opportunity for the generation of so-called elite people who already have stable social status but participated in the movement back then to reflect their present and past. The fact that this novel summons ‘Gwangju as a superego’ is quite meaningful in that it harshly criticizes the fault and hypocrisy of the generation with movement group background through the author’s unique indicative. The damaged body of Jeongyeon who came back alive from the scene of Gwangju after nearly 30 years points out the violence of the present memory which tries to fossilize Gwangju as a historic event. Han Gang’s Here comes a boy is a novel which is concerned with the ultimate way of reproducing the tragedy. Usually, novels regarding Gwangju reproduce the tragedy of Gwangju through describing the damaged body of the dead or the painful souls of those who survived. On the contrary, Han Gang’s Here comes a boy tries to reveal the horrors of Gwangju more accurately through reproducing the tragedy by depicting the voices of the painful souls of the dead or describing the physical humiliation of survivors with the device of ‘impossible to testify’. Furthermore, Here comes a boy is meaningful in that it tries to deliver the testimonies of young boys and girls, and female workers who were not able to tell their stories fully in other existing novels. The accomplishment of Here comes a boy would be noticing the individuality of pains through resisting the movement of understanding and making the history of Gwangju as a mere anonymous collective tragedy. The meaning and possibility of bringing Gwangju to the present could be reconsidered through these novels which fill the gap where the existing narratives failed to cover.

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