• Journal of Popular Narrative
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• v.26 no.2
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• pp.191-219
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• 2020

This paper aims to identify the key features of the novel writing of Korean American immigrants and their meaning as one aspect of movement and contact occuring in the early modern period. The late return of the novels written by Nakcheong THUN in the 1930s is significant in that it restored ideas on the diversity of early modern mobility and confronted the history and culture of immigrants who were excluded from records and memories. Not only are these novels a product of the phenomenon of immigration, but they have also created a crack in the dichotomous perceptions of domination and subordination, center and periphery by envisioning it as a space that creates new history, culture, institutions and values. These novels treat the free love of intellectual, emotional, and ethical figures as a central event, demystifying Western free love, and at the same time, a society divided by various identities including class, race, and gender. The novels by Nakchung THUN visualize the active exchange between the immigrant and the indigenous community through the character of Jack, and imagines the heterotopia as a place where not for the immigrants' utopia, but for everyone's coexists. These novels have declared a kind of memory war on the subordinate and marginalized contact zones. The contact zones of the immigration area had been a place for experiencing extreme conflicts and discords, and at the same time, it has served as a place where various groups and communities are connected. The contact zones were common areas of solidarity and creation before being subject to division and occupation. The contact zones are far from the border or borderlands, so it is not a fixed and immutable deadlock. As a world free from central domination the contact zones have been a space that preoccupied history and culture through various encounters, and have been a community.

• Journal of Families and Better Life
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• v.22 no.3
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• pp.75-93
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• 2004

This study examined discourses on “wise-mother and good-wife” in the 1920s - 1930s by analyzing the magazine “Shinyeosung.” This study found the following: 1 “Wise-mother and good-wife” was the ideal type for the “new women” during the colonial period. Hut the role of a mother was far more important than that of a wife. 2. The dominant discourse at the time was that the “genuine” new woman was defined by her motherhood, and she could not have a job because raising children was the most Important task for her. Hut in fact, new women wanted to be a wife through free love and marriage. They wished to be a good-wife in the “new (modern) family” for their loving husbands. 3. The Ideas of “wise-mother” and “good-wife” arose from disparate backgrounds. A woman had to nurture her maternal aptitudes; but had to suppress her passion for free love and marriage. Although she had to learn Western methods of bringing up children instead of the traditional one, she was expected to practice traditional virtues of a wife, not Western attitudes. The role of a mother was decided by experts, but that of a wife was decided by husbands. The function of a good-wife was merely a clever handling of her husband, whereas the function of a mother was considered to require professional knowledge. 4. New women could differentiate themselves from “old women” through the roles of wise-mother and good-wife; nonetheless, those roles were forced by society. They did not have any other viable choices.

• Journal of Popular Narrative
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• v.26 no.3
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• pp.161-188
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• 2020

This paper seeks to expand the scale of literary history by restoring and analyzing the whole aspect of Kwak Hashin's works, which has so far been studied little. For this purpose, I notice the rupture of discontinuity of his works which is greatly divided into the colonial period and post Korean war period. And the characteristics of each works can be analyzed based on the three axis, local(colonial period), jobless person(post-war period), and Homo Economicus(some short stories, and popular novels in post-war period). In Chapter 2, 'Local-the world of Munjang', I evaluated that Kwak Hashin's novel, which had been published in the late 1930s in the Journal of Munjang, embodied anti-modern aesthetic consciousness, as clearly revealing the sorrow for disappearing things, the pre-modern sense of time, and the preference for local. In Chapter 3, 'Jobless Person' and Chapter 4, 'The State of All People's Struggle against All People, The Appearance of Homo Economicus', the Korean society in late 1950s, which entered underdeveloped capitalist countries after Korean war, can be characterized by two contrasting male-gender, one is the jobless, incompetent male, and the economic man on the other hand. In the late '50s, Lumpen(=Jobless Person) novels showed the problems of the Korean economy through incompetent male character. The intelligent men took the path to survival rather than morality or intimacy, projecting their own incompetence and anxiety to women/wives. In the popular novels Women's Song and The Shadow of the Fig Tree, achievement-oriented male figures who betrayed their colleagues, and exploited women's sex by using love relationships to rise to the top appeared. They can be defined as the Homo Economicus who embody the state of universal struggle against all people. These novels showed the formation of the masculinity in post Korean war period, which pursued the survival of the fittest, borrowing form of popular novel. As we have seen so far, Kwak Hashin needs to be re-evaluated as an writer who expanded the modern literary history in the outside of literature. He was the last generation writer written in Korean late colonial period, and provided the model of postwar literature by borrowing the form of journalism and popular novels.