Showing 1 - 2 of 2 Items
The Wound and the Word: Examining the Literary Afterlife of Gwangju’s Trauma in Korean and
Korean Diaspora Literature
Date: 2025-01-01
Creator: Seo Yeon (Sophie) Yook
Access: Open access
- My project examines the enduring legacy of the May 1980 Gwangju Uprising and its reverberations across Korean and Korean American literature, memory, and identity. Framed by the unforeseen reemergence of martial law in South Korea on December 3, 2024–an event that eerily echoed the nation’s violent, authoritarian past–this project interrogates how historical trauma continues to resurface and be reflected in political reality and cultural narrative. Anchored in close readings of Han Kang’s Human Acts and E. J. Koh’s The Liberators, my project traces a literary and ethical journey mapped through the metaphor of the wound: “Bloodshed,” where pain erupts; “Inflammation,” where it lingers and deepens; and “Growth and Rebuilding," where healing becomes imaginable, if never quite complete. The first chapter positions Han’s polyphonic novel as a work of countermemory, a literary act of resistance against state-sanctioned silence that then demands active readerly participation. The second chapter turns to Koh’s diasporic narrative to consider how trauma migrates across generations and geographies through the medium of translation, revealing the subtler textures of inherited pain. Finally, the last chapter synthesizes theories of postmemory and reparative reading to intimate how the pair of texts move beyond trauma’s paralysis, imagining pathways toward healing, remembrance, and collective renewal. Ultimately, I contend that literature offers a vital site for rearticulating and re-envisioning suppressed histories, particularly in the wake of political repression and cultural amnesia. In returning to Gwangju as a living, aching wound, this project engages in the ethical labor of remembrance and the hopeful, reparative task of repair. It affirms narrative as both vessel and balm, as a means of bearing pain and of gesturing toward the possibility of healing across time, space, language, and community.
Invisible Ailments: A Collection
Date: 2023-01-01
Creator: Jane L. Godiner
Access: Open access
- "Invisible Ailments" is a collection of short stories that trace the depth, breath, and sweeping range of lived experiences of people struggling with mental illness. While it is a work of fiction, the people in these stories might feel eerily familiar — to your friends, your family members, your loved ones, or, if you're brave enough to admit it, yourself.