Abstract

Cultural time does not flow lineally. Cultural history is layered like strata. If one of the tasks of criticism is to summon unrealized historical possibilities from the strata of the past and connect them with the fate of the future, we need to go back to women’s literature of the 1990s. Women’s literature in the 1990s was a turning point in the history of Korean women’s literature. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet system in 1991, the progressive movement of the 1980s was in decline, and disillusionment and cynicism toward grand narrative became the dominant structure of feeling at that time. However, for women this period was also a time of sexual awakening. The collapse of the grand narrative allowed women to witness the spectacle of the hugely inflated male subject losing its steam, and led them to the awakening, rebellion, and self-discovery. At a historical turning point where disillusionment and awakening intersected, women’s literature in the 1990s was not ghettoized in the periphery of Korean literature, but enters its center. This paper views the three temporalities or fronts of women’s literature in the 1990s as ① the restoration of marginalized women through feminist mourning for the national and popular literature of the 1980s (residual front), ② the discovery of ‘I’ as a gendered subject and experiment of feminine writing (dominant front), ③ the emergence of de-gendered post-individuals and expression of minority queer sensibilities (emergent front), and provides a overall mapping of women’s literature in the 1990s through the overdetermination of these three fronts.