[SILS Faculty Seminar] Resonance with Others: Transformations of the Autobiographical Novel in The Man’s House by Park Wan-su

1. Lecturer: BAE, Sangmi

　　     *Lecturer Information:

　　　　　https://w-rdb.waseda.jp/html/100003002_en.html

2. Title:

 Resonance with Others: Transformations of the Autobiographical Novel in The Man’s House by Park Wan-su

3. Day and Time: February 2 ,2023    5:30pm –

4. Abstract:

  This study examines how the autobiographical novel form affords the resonation of multiple voices as the narrator listens to and appreciates others through a close reading of Park Wan-suh’s final novel, The Man’s House (Kŭ namjane chip, 2004). Park is a prominent postwar woman writer whose numerous autographical works are based primarily on her experiences during WWII and the Korean War. Although similar in form to her other autobiographical novels, The Man’s House spans the much longer period between 1950 and the early 2000s and breaks with the form’s conventional grammar privileging the narrator’s story by incorporating the voices of various interlocutors who have suffered the deep mental and physical wounds of modern warfare, and uniquely adding Vietnam War memories which readers cannot revisit in her other novels. Previous research on her autobiographical novels centers on the repetitive portrayal of her war experiences as a means of resolving the author’s war trauma, delivering political messages following postwar social transition, and representing the (South) Korean people’s scars from war. Yet this scholarship has not shed light on the specific formal characteristics of her autobiographical novels although the form contributes significantly to realizing the author’s intentions and constructing the narrative’s communality. Nevertheless, as the last novel published by Park, The Man’s House also constitutes something of a culmination of her autobiographical novels’ trajectory: not as an individual’s painful memoir but as a foil for the resonance of various underrepresented people’s injuries from wars. I suggest that Park’s modified autobiographical novel thereby transcends the individuality originally proscribed by the form toward an open-ended inclusivity of diverse resounding voices subverting hegemonic grand narratives of modern Korea’s wartime tribulations.