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Journal Central

Mirok Li's <Der Yalu Fließt>, <Kamp um den Sohn>, and <Pflicht des Sohnes> deal with similar times, spaces, and events from the perspectives of the father, mother, and son, respectively. If we consider the literary characteristic of Li as ‘the aesthetics of hometown and nostalgia’, the difference of narrative should be regarded as the author's intention to look at the nostalgia's retrospective identity in three ways of memory. Through this difference of narrative, the author reconstructs childhood and creates memories of his hometown. The representation of his hometown, created through the literary works of his hometown, remembers his hometown, and becomes a social memory that goes beyond personal memory. It was engraved as a representation of the pre-modern Joseon facing the modernization (Western), which is why the Germans became enthusiastic about <Der Yalu Fließt>. If a simple collection of facts of the past is not a memory but a reconstruction through imagination, the image of the hometown is created through the narrative of the memory of the hometown. Li's literature, which thought it was the value of literature to create a representation of innocence through non-partisanness and non-tendency, was able to comfort Germans in crisis while stabilizing the memory of the Vaterland through collective memory.

Imagination, nostalgia, hometown, homeland, motherland, fatherland, memory, collective memory, Mnemosyne, space representation, Vaterland, Mutterland, Heimatland