Research Article
The Representations of Gyeongseong/Manchuria in Han Seol Ya`s Novels and Undecidable Cultural Geography
서강대학교 동아연구소
Published: January 2016 · Vol. 70, No. 0 · pp. 33-74
DOI: https://doi.org/10.33334/sieas.2016.35.1.33
Full Text
Abstract
This study intends to analyze the representations of Gyeongseong/ Manchuria in Han Seol Ya’s Inward Hometown and Continent. The focus is on “machine de guerre” which constantly cause divisions and conflicts to satisfy capitalistic desire in those two spaces. Han Seol Ya, committed to his militant attitude, inserted a gang of spies/machine de guerre called known as the ‘oriental club’ into the narratives of Inward Hometown and Continent. Their role was to trigger possibilities for struggle in Gyeongseong/Manchuria which was in danger of becoming a conflict-less space of homogeneous imperial rule in the late Japanese colonial period. By using this literary device of the ‘oriental club’, Han could represent The Greater East Asia as a space of undecidability, with several violence-filled prospects that could not be expected to converge toward a single system. Han Seol Ya’ imagination of Gyeongseong/Manchuria visualized the aspect of deconstruction that motivated each force’s decentralization and dissolution. Moreover, this paper tries to grasp spatiality as a product of movements in both directions (capturing the state system and dissolution due to the machine de guerre), which is worthy of notice because it creates the possibility for more stereoscopic analysis of general spatiality, even outside of Han Seol Ya’s text.
