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Female Subject and Abject Body Represented in Lee Yeon-ju’s Poetry

  • DONAM OHMUNHAK
  • Abbr : 돈암
  • 2020, 38(), pp.201~240
  • DOI : 10.17056/donam.2020.38..201
  • Publisher : The Donam Language & Literature
  • Research Area : Humanities > Korean Language and Literature > Korean Literature > History of Korean Literature
  • Received : November 25, 2020
  • Accepted : December 28, 2020
  • Published : December 31, 2020

SeulA Chung 1

1성신여자대학교 인문과학연구소

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This study analyzes the subjects of Lee Yeon-ju’s poetry in the view of Butler to identify them as “abject” beings who are abandoned in a society and discuss how “a being in progress” handles and represents the pain. In her poems, various body images not only simply reveal pain and death but also are manifested in multi-levels spanning females as victims, survivors, and the persons directly involved; moreover, the “abject” strategy adopted as the subjects’ way of understanding the world is in pursuit of clarifying it as practical resistance against real world through reappropriation of femininity in a new way. Furthermore, it is to improve the literary significance of Lee Yeon-ju’s poems in the history of Korean women’s poetry by examining her aesthetics making a difference with Choi Seung-ja in 1980s. Lee Yeon-ju’s poems challenge to Motherhood-Myth squarely but does not return to Kristeva’s semiotic chora of motherhood. While Choi Seung-ja’s early poems deal with pains and advance to the ethics of mourning through common senses, Lee Yeon-ju’s poems take issues on women’s conditions through suffering bodies. It reveals multi-layered women’s status under structure of discrimination mingled and overlapped with various conditions such as gender, race, country, and religion. Lee Yeon-ju’s poems obtain practicability by representing various women’s experiences, disclosing the identity of external suppression, and subverting femininity at the same time. The images of suffering bodies penetrate women’s experiences, not ignoring differences but revealing itself. In that it is a fundamental challenge to the definitions and conditions of women, it can be an effective way of resistance against power system that pursues nihility of differences. The resistance is related to the possibility of solidarity based on bodies through converting subject’s beings that can be named as ‘Poetics of Ashes,’ which is adopted at the second collection of her poetry. The meaning of Lee Yeon-ju’s poems is in that represents female subjects in the way of practice and resistance, and that is a fruit of women’s poems in the 1990s.

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