[Feature] The Imagination of Care, Dreaming of Transforming Life: Focusing on the Novels of Hwang Jung-eun and Lee Ju-Hye / Baik Ji-yeon
The Quarterly Changbi 192, Summer 2021
Abstract
The feature in this issue explores where literature’s imaginative ability should be directed, during this pandemic era, which brings about the intensified inequality and isolation. Paying attention to the stories of women and families as narrative resources that connect the youth problem, gender inequality, and care crisis, literary critic Baik Ji-yeon carefully reads novels by Hwang Jung-eun and Lee Ju-Hye. Through their works, which not only meticulously describe the entrenched customs in patriarchal family structure, but also encourage ideas for new kinds of community to overcome it, Baik’s article investigates care as relational labor, and as one of transformative imaginations necessary for the literature of our time.