Abstract

How is the “Yonsei University Incident” of August 1996 remembered from a periphery perspective and a gender perspective? With this question in mind, I reviewed the history of the revolution and the missing memories in the period from 1996 to 2016 in Korean literature. I tried to recover the story of the revolution experienced and remembered by those who were politically invisible or gender-excluded, by centering on novels with strange reminiscences of the student movement in 1996, namely Yoon I-Hyung’s “Big Wolf Blue” (“Big Wolf Blue”, 2011), Choi Eun-Young’s “Responsibility”(2018), Hwang Jung-Eun’s Didi’s Umbrella(2019) and Park Sang- Young’s “A piece of Rockfish Sashimi The Taste of the Universe”(How to Love in Metropolis, 2019). There is a correlation between the perception of the periphery and the name of the “unrememberable” revolution. And this fact tells us that revolution does not mean the same thing to everyone, even when it “passes” through the midst of a revolution that shares the imagination of a better society and the desire to reorganize the system. In other words, it emphasizes that the logic of exclusion and hierarchy was still in operation even at the moment of revolution. It would be said that this review is not only a rethinking of the student movement, but also a reevaluation from the gender perspective of Korean society in the 1990s.