Spatial Production and Literature in the Park Chung Hee Era

This dissertation argues that South Korean fiction of the 1970s did not merely reflect the spatial transformations that took place during the Park Chung Hee era (1961-1979) but actively produced, contested, and reimagined them. Reading five major writers of the period through a methodology of spatial close reading, the project traces a spatial arc from the rural/urban divide to the semi-peripheral factory zone, to the domestic threshold, and finally to the interior psyche, demonstrating that space was the primary terrain on which the Park regime’s developmental logic was imposed and resisted. In doing so, it recovers a dimension of this literature’s political significance that existing scholarship has not yet fully explored, while advancing spatial close reading as a methodology with implications beyond the specific conditions of Cold War South Korea.  

 

Tanner Rogers is a PhD candidate in Asian & Middle Eastern Cultures & Media at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.

 

This talk is hybrid, Zoom link:https://umn.zoom.us/j/97089859572 or contact [email protected].