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The Ways imagining Place Identity of Overseas Cities through International Journey Novel - With novels City and Me as examples -

Cho, Myung-Ki 1

1부산대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This essay aims to explore the way that travel epic imagines and composes overseas spaces(cities) or mental geography constructed or reenacted through travel and imagination which fixes the location of the principal subject with novels 'City and me' as examples. Epics in the novels within the collection 'City and me', which deal with international travels, evolve along the process of recognizing place identity of unknown spaces and incorporating it into a part of knowledge. But as there is absence of the principal agent who can convert the unknown to the state of the known, they try to recognize place identity through various intersections of views, which is accompanied by the process of finding out and adjusting self-identity. discovery of the value of travel in the process of reconstruction of self-identity through newly contained place identity as the object of knowledge paradoxically disguises self-identity which used to be the unknown as the already existing and known. Emotions of characters who visit unknown places and people carry melancholy, not complete condolence. If it is the fact that melancholy arises from the lack of the possession in the first place, not from the loss of the object of possession and thus, paradoxically disguises as if it used to possess the object by deceiving lack as loss and if condolence is the process of internalizing the object of loss and making it a part of principal agent by deleting otherness, characters' self-identities are lost,not lacking and, hence, self-identity of the travelers are regarded to be recovered by controlling and devouring place identity of the destination. Characters are regarded as principal agents of the unknown and ignorance by having their roots deleted and settlement becomes space without identity by becoming a being which achieves deceptive spectacle of self-identity through place identity of destination. These epics of novels expose aspects of manifestation of modernity(post-modernity) in ambient way and reveals anxiety and horror latent in modernity(post-modernity).

Citation status

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

This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.