[Feature] Literature That Prepares Us for the Future / Hwang Jung-a
The Quarterly Changbi 198, Winter 2022
Abstract
This issue’s feature finds the strength and imagination to overcome crises that our times are confronting in literature. Through literary and discursive diagnoses and analyses of a diversity of literary works, focusing on the climate crisis, capitalism, and labor, we explore the way forward for literature in our times. Literary critic Hwang Jung-a carefully examines what recent critical discourses focusing on macro-narratives did and didn’t achieve, and lays a foundation for critical thinking and literary questions about the current global capitalist system. Arguing that literature that dreams of a changed reality should also aspire to think about transitions and imagine the course of change, Hwang examines the ability for the transition that literature should nurture, focusing on short stories by Jeong Ji A and Kwon Yeo-sun.