earticle

영어

This article contends that realism is still a valid aesthetic for literature from the periphery of the world literary system through examining Sok-yong Hwang’s East Asia trilogy: The Guest, Shim Chong, and Princess Bari. As a representative writer of Korean realism, Hwang would not give up trying to represent the reality of the voiceless and powerless people and make their voices heard, but he had to develop a more marketable form and content for international readers. His “poetic narrative” is what he has developed as a way to hold the realist spirit in a new form, and the trilogy is its outcome. Despite ghosts’ appearance, the use of shamanistic motifs and ceremonies, and the use of multiple perspectives, his fiction always engages with real politics. By discussing the Sin’chŏn massacre in The Guest, the history of women exploited by capitalism in Shim Chong, and the migrants living on the periphery of the neoliberal world-system in Princess Bari, this article delves into how Hwang’s experiments with realism make the voices from the periphery more accessible to international readers.