본문 바로가기
  • Home
Basic Search

Korean Literature and the Conspiracy Imaginary in the 1990s

  • Journal of Popular Narrative
  • 2025, 31(1), pp.347~426
  • Publisher : The Association of Popular Narrative
  • Research Area : Interdisciplinary Studies > Interdisciplinary Research
  • Received : January 6, 2025
  • Accepted : February 18, 2025
  • Published : February 28, 2025

Ahn Sejin 1,  Seo, Ukhee 1,  JANG WONSEOK 1

1서울대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

In the 1980s, regardless of its ideological orientation, Korean society had a clear image of the enemy to fight against. However, in the 1990s, with the formal democratization and the fall of real socialism, the enemy seemed to disappear. While suffering persisted, there was no enemy to be imagined as the cause of that suffering. This is the fundamental crisis that Korean society faced in the 1990s. In order to comprehend and explain the ongoing suffering, the conspiracy imaginary began to emerge. In the context of 1990s South Korea, conspiracy narratives functioned as a substitute for the missing grand narratives of the 1980s. In the absence of narratives, the conspiracy imaginary provided a linear and binary interpretive framework, in a way to bypass the diversified structure of the antagonism in the 1990s with the image of a collective enemy. The paper argues that a series of conspiracy novels that emerged in the 1990s must be evaluated as an aspect of 1990s literature that responds to the realities of the time. It is an attempt to draw a cognitive map of the entire 1990s Korean literature field, including both pure and popular literature, through the framework of conspiracy theory. Chapter 2 examines how the conspiracy imaginary in popular literature field strengthened the agency of characters by analyzing Kim Jin–myung’s The Mugunghwa Bloomed (1993), Lee In–hwa’s The Eternal Empire (1993), and Lee Myung–haeng’s The Yellow Bird’s Claw (1993), thus discovers the nationalist ideology behind them. Chapter 3 explores Jang Tae–il’s The Man of 49 Days (1993) and Kim Yeon–soo’s Walking While Pointing to the Mask (1994), winners of the Jakgasegye Literature Award, to identify the literary field’s commercial inclinations to utilize the conspiracy imaginary, as well as the limits to which such imaginary could only be accommodated within the conventional shells of pure literature as retrospection narrative and metafiction. Chapter 4 reads Song Kyung–ah’s Kidnapping (1994), Trout and Silverfish (1994), and Djuna’s Under the Sphinx (1998) and Puppets (2000) to discover how the conspiracy imaginary is appropriated as a critical narrative technique in the new territory of PC literature, while the figure of the enemy at the center of the plot is replaced by writers, LGBTQ people, and the void.

Statistics

  • 88 Viewed
  • 29 Downloaded

Tools

Issue List

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.

Basic Search Advanced Search