From the 1960s onwards, Park Kyung-ri wrote numerous full-length, serialised and popular novels, frequently depicting “novelists” as protagonists. These novelist novels are not mere products of confessional tendencies or popular narrative conventions; rather, they reflect a self-perception shaped by the gendered regulations of patriarchal modernity, as well as a critical awareness of a commodified society that privileges secular success.
In My Heart Is a Lake and An Eternal Partner, the novelist figures attempt to confront overwhelming realities—war, incomplete revolution, and capitalism—through literature, but gradually become disempowered under the logic of public discourse, state authority, and developmentalist ideology. However, this perceived futility of literature paradoxically gives rise to a reparative force that sustains ethical responsibility rather than abandoning literary practice. By the time we reach Winter Rain, Park’s approach to the novelist novel moves beyond autobiographical reflection or epistemological inquiry. Instead, it intervenes in the fixed notion of authorship as a discrete, self-contained identity and reveals literature as a site of agency and continuous (re)arrangement, generated through its intra-active entanglements with readers.
Literature emerges not as an autonomous object but as an indeterminate process of entanglement, in which author, text, and reader—along with creative, narrative, and critical practices—are interrelated and mutually reconstituted. Park Kyung-ri’s renewal of the conventional novelist novel gestures toward a literary ethics grounded in responsibility, formed within entangled encounters with the Other.