[Feature] How Does Care Become Embodied in Literature? / Song Jong-won
The Quarterly Changbi 196, Summer 2022
Abstract
In the midst of a climate crisis and intensified capitalism, our civilization faces a fundamen-tal turning point. In order to create positive change in our society, we need, above all, a re-newal of our sensibilities in understanding it. In this issue’s feature, Song Jong-won exam-ines how recent literature copes with this reality, focusing on care, a topic that has drawn thoughtful attention recently, and women’s reality. After taking to task Korean poetry criti-cism in the mid-2000s, the so-called “futurist debate,” for its insensitivity toward the value of care and its gender-related implications, he asks us to rethink human subjectivity “not around autonomy and independence, but around interdependence and vulnerability” through an analysis of the poetic worlds of Yi Geun Hwa and Park Soran. Also, in his illu-mination of the works of female farmer and poet Choi Jeong, his argument expands to in-clude the theme of a renewal of 1990s ecological literature. Agendas such as a “green grammar” and “ecological literacy” that Song argues for through this discussion offer im-portant clues to the exploration of a new relationship between humans and nature.