한국전쟁과 문학적 자기 기술－박완서와 이청준의 ‘말년의 서사’를 중심으로－

Abstract

This paper illustrates the experience and consciousness of the Korean War generation, and examines the social and literary meanings by analyzing literary self-descriptions which had been written in their later years. The problem of this paper begins by asking why some writers, who devoted their lives to writing novels, tried to go back to the Korean War at their later years. This paper examines the representative writers who used the experience of Korean War as their literary genesis, such as Park Wan-seo and Lee Chung-jun. It is important to understand the fact that writers who had focused on the issue of division started to reflect on their lives as writers in the 1990s and try to describe themselves in the form of literary self-description. In the 1990s, when political and literary field had been changed rapidly, they recognized themselves as a “war generation” in terms of historicization of their lives, and tried to confront a new literary dilemma which could be correlated with generational gap. The writings left by these writers in their later years still attempt to testify of war, while at the same time constructing a self-defensive narrative. In this regard, their works are examples of historical dilemma confronted by the writers of the war generation, which indicated the historical transformation which had been triggered by the end of the Cold War. Furthermore, their work needs to be reinterpreted as a cultural product that implicitly contained the logic and contradictions of the perception of the times that the writers of the war generation had.