This study explores Park Wan-seo’s (박완서, 1931–2011) engagement with Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), focusing on her understanding of his theories and how she discovered Freudian elements within contemporary Korean women. By examining the desires and complexes of Korean women that permeate her works, the study aims to reveal how Park incorporated and transformed Freudian concepts in her literature. Unlike conventional literary studies that utilize Freudian psychoanalysis as a critical framework for analyzing individual works, this research highlights how Park, often referred to as the ‘Mother of Korean Literature,’ actively engaged with Freud’s theories and deliberately integrated them into her writing. It seeks to trace the ways in which Freud’s ideas were received and refracted within her works. While Park acknowledged that Freudian psychoanalysis helps in understanding gender differences in Korean society, she also maintained a cautious perspective on it, as its subtle and pervasive influence often goes unnoticed by Korean women, despite governing their lives. Through her literature, she urged women to recognize and reflect on these hidden forces shaping their lives.

Michel Foucault defined Freud as a "trans-discursive author" because his psychoanalytic theories established a new discourse and introduced paradigm shifts across various disciplines. Freud’s influence extended beyond medicine and philosophy to literature, and in Korea, his psychoanalysis was first introduced during the Japanese colonial period. Since then, it has garnered significant interest from Korean writers. Notably, literary circles engaged with Freudian theory more actively than other academic fields at the time. Despite recent scholarly efforts to examine how Freud’s psychoanalysis was introduced and translated in Korea, research analyzing its interpretation, transformation, and reception in specific literary works remains insufficient.

This study not only investigates how Freud’s theories were adopted but also examines how Park Wan-seo’s literature transcends and challenges the Freudian worldview. Park believed that Freud’s concept of the female Oedipus complex could explain Korean mothers’ excessive attachment to their sons. She interpreted the preference for male children—commonly represented by the figure of the mother-in-law—as a manifestation of women’s desire to compensate for their own societal oppression, particularly stemming from the historical devaluation of women due to their lack of a phallus. According to Freud, women struggle more than men in resolving the Oedipus complex, which could lead to potential ethical dilemmas. However, even Freud himself acknowledged the limitations of his theory regarding the female Oedipus complex, suggesting that it did not achieve the same level of theoretical clarity as its male counterpart.

Yet, Park Wan-seo did not view the female Oedipus complex as a fixed structure. Instead, she advocated for overcoming this Freudian framework. Rather than accepting Freud’s theories as an inevitable fate, she treated them as obstacles to be surmounted, envisioning literature as a means to enlighten reality. A prime example is her novel, Are You Still Dreaming?, which was inspired by her experiences as a member of the conciliation committee at a family court. As she stated in an interview, this novel was conceived as a direct attempt to transcend the female Oedipus complex, guided by a clear commitment to enlightenment. Even in her final novel, His House, Park continued her literary exploration of transcending the Freudian world.

This study seeks to analyze how Freud’s theories were received and refracted throughout Park Wan-seo’s body of work, to identify the Freudian elements she observed in Korean society, and to explore her commitment to using literature not just to interpret reality but to enlighten and transform it.

The proposed paper will examine the poetry of Cathy Park Hong and the works of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha to uncover how their works rely on technological motifs to address the difficulty inherent in the communicability of their respective experiences as Korean-American immigrants. The works of both poets employ stutters, fragmentation, silences, and erasures to reflect upon the untranslatable and unbridgeable gaps in experience and the inadequacy of available communicative modes to inscribe and convey their individual and collective experience of exile, diasporic travel and assimilation. While Cha’s works employ technological apparatus in various forms (photographs, videos, and art installations) to contemplate upon the themes of immigrant assimilation, untranslatability, and the history of the Korean-Japanese conflict, Hong’s works employ futuristic and fictive scientific images to ponder upon similar questions of exile, linguistic colonialism, and the violent histories that circumscribe Korean-American immigrant experience. The proposed paper is specifically invested in examining how the works of both poets in their unique ways emphasize on the performative and embodied aspects of their subject matter, and in doing so present a poetic performance that resists easy subsumption into algorithmic pattern-seeking or text mining.

This study examines the liminal and diasporic experience of reading aloud Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s DICTEE as a performative enactment of a shamanistic ritual. As an artist’s book that defies conventional genre classifications, the experience of reading DICTEE differs significantly from that of typical literary texts. Many readers have noted the distinctive impact of reading DICTEE aloud compared to silent reading, as evidenced by the recent surge of read-aloud sessions of DICTEE in both the United States and South Korea. To identify anew the unique form and aesthetics of reading DICTEE aloud, this study conceptualizes oral reading of DICTEE as a performative and ontological event that transcends the boundaries of the typical literary reading experience.

DICTEE invents two opposing modes of translation between spoken and written language: dictation and recitation. While orality is often linked to Otherness, including primitivity and femininity, literacy is closely associated with modern Western imperialism, a relationship that extends to the sensory hierarchy between sound and vision. Therefore, DICTEE employs a strategy in which orality actively infiltrates and disrupts the structure of textuality, through techniques such as the manipulation of punctuation and spacing, the use of homophones, and the destruction of syntax. Fragmented by the penetration of orality, DICTEE forms a new borderline language that simultaneously embodies and dismantles orality and textuality.

Reading aloud, on the other hand, serves as a material translation that brings the text of DICTEE to life through the reader's body. In DICTEE, the Diseuse experiences speech as physical exertion, foregrounding the material dimension of language beyond the semantic. Theorists such as Walter J. Ong, Hélène Cixous, and Mladen Dolar highlight the subversive potential inherent in the voice: whereas writing anchors the spoken word within the visual domain, sound creates an aural space that dissolves the boundaries between the subject and the Other.

By being performed through the reader’s voice, the oral reading of DICTEE functions as a shamanic ritual that restores voices that have never been spoken or heard throughout history. By allowing multiple voices to speak through the reader's body simultaneously, the oral reading of DICTEE breaks down bodily and ontological boundaries between the subject and Other, fostering an affective community that transcends the division between gender and race, extending across both historical and fictional space-time. However, this community also shares sensory alienation, as DICTEE is marked by fundamental unreadability — manifested in its use of multiple languages, unreadable photographs, diagrams, and margins, etc. The community emerging through the oral reading of DICTEE inhabits this epistemological and sensory void, opening an interstitial and diasporic space-time that will be continually performed and reconstituted through shamanic invocation.

Since aeons, in popular culture and literature, imaginary beings have been a part of the cultural and social mnemoscape and myths of the place, offering a vision of the world of choice and analysing the practical world of conflicts. In the contemporary cinematic world, the kaiju genre representing strange, large creatures (Godzilla) often represent or attack overly large but real human issues like colonization, pollution and scientific ethics among other things. This paper will look into the representation of two imaginary beings –the Korean Gumiho (or the, nine- tailed fox) and Dakhin Rai (a revered deity/ demon king of the Sunderbans, India)- using the theoretical framework of eco postcolonialism and critical place (Trinh T. Minh-ha, Butler, Biana) and explore how the realms of the fantasy and the real often become blurred and the monstrosity that gets created is rooted in realism, place-politics and everyday occurrences.

These mythical imaginary beings are often ‘betwixt and between’; their marginality is often seen as a threat as well as a promise of a new world order to the existing patterns of socio-political structure. The researcher will analyse Amitav Ghosh’s Jungle Nama and the visual text of Han Woo-ri’s Tale of the Nine Tailed 1938(available on OTT platforms) and look at the portrayals of identity (both personal and social), loss and recovery (Nandy) and the hegemonic ‘immanent’ techno- cultural understandings of place and being.