포스트기억 세대와 한국전쟁의 문화기억 - 전쟁 쓰레기 (2004)와 포로들의 춤(2016)을 중심으로

Abstract

As the 70th anniversary of the armistice of the Korean War is coming, memories of the war are facing polarization. Although memory of experience is about to extinct, the past is becoming more active through the translation of cultural memory, rather than being forgotten. Ha Jin’s novel War Trash(2004) and Choi Soo-cheol’s serial novels, the Dance of POWs(2013), which are based on the theme of memories of the Korean War POWs, have many similarities. The two works revive the memories of war prisoners from a different perspective, which differs from the official narrative, by mixing fiction and the knowledge obtained from documents and testimonies in the frame of the family narrative. In War Trash, a memoir of the People’s Volunteer Army soldier, the individual postmemory is incorporated into the immigrant family narrative and remains as the memory of a minority. On the other hand, in the Dance of POWs, the story of the Korean People’s Army soldier and his daughter, the individual’s post-memory is on the verge of extinction along with the roughly torn family history, but becomes a counter-memory by urging the people involved to remember. Despite these differences, the two works eventually join the common dimension through transferring postmemory to readers. The two writers talked about the unwritten history of prisoners of the Korean War by finding, reflecting, and rewriting their memories hidden or forgotten in long silence.