Abstract

This paper analyzes three novels written by female novelists in the 2020s. O-gi by Cho Nam-ju, That Novel by Park Seo-ryun, and Chorong, the Double-faced Writer by Lee Misang all share the commonality of being novels written by women authors featuring a female novelist as the first-person protagonist who articulates her concerns about writing novels. Through the format of novelist novels, these works address the issues of the reproduction of women’s lives that have become mainstream after the reboot of feminism, thereby demonstrating the ethics of self-narrative as women and as female novelists. Specifically, these issues manifest in the questions of ‘why write,’ ‘what to write,’ and ‘how to write,’ and the quest for answers to these questions. Writing novels is both showing and can be seen as the process itself. Ultimately, each novel answers that they write to ‘encounter intersecting women’s lives’ (why write), write about ‘what can, should, and must be written’ (what to write), and that they must write while being conscious of a third party beyond themselves (how to write). These novels, which ponder from the reasons for writing to the ethics of reproduction, are more than just novels; they show a way of articulating life as women and as female novelists outside of novels, and how the personas of female novelists outside of novels articulate life as women through their self-narratives, demonstrating a way of living that considers oneself.