Abstract

In this article, I examined Joen Hye-lin's life and literature, focusing on their relation of the literary system of Korea and the unique cultural site that her position as a translator placed in. Joen has excluded from the boundary of the 'stern' Korean literary history, for she wrote mainly essay seen as a marginal genre, or translated foreign literary works, in addition her abnormal biography as intellectual woman had mythologized and enjoyed as a girlish taste. System like 'Shinchoon Munyae' that literary men made their debut got utilized as a gate of rising the world to compensate for poverty and desolation postwar. In this male central literary world of Korea in the 1950's~60's, she was a heterogeneous being who was a bourgeois woman and a liberalist experiencing directly the Western culture, very different from 'a careful literary woman.' She had convicted distance of 'the Western culture' and Korean one and made their hierarchy, through translating the western literature, which was the reason she couldn't root in the society and the literary world of Korea. As it were, her spiritualism and stoicism, which she experienced and learned from the western literature, made her be look down upon Korean society and literary world controled by philistinism. In her thoughts, 'the European' and 'the American' was matched with each spiritualism and materialism, and only the former was represented as pure and mythologized image of 'the Western.' This Western image evoked mass echo. However, identifying with the Western essentialized, she tried to resist against the philistine negativity in realities which, in conclusion. made her life and literature place in the outside of concrete realities.