The Meaning of the Apartment as Home: through Analysing Everyday Life in Short Stories in the 1970s

Abstract

(Background and Purpose) This research investigates the relationship between everyday life and space to explore the meaning of home through analysing the apartment in the 1970s. There are many studies on the apartment in the 1970s, but mainly focusing on physical factors, rather than social aspects in microscopic viewpoint. It is essential to analyse daily life to understand home within the culture. Thus, this paper aims to trace how daily life, described in the novels in the 1970s, is experienced by social and spatial context, and how it affects the development of apartments. (Method) This research combines a literature review with theoretical research, seen as complementary ways of exploring embodied experiential socially situated aspects of Korean daily life in an apartment through analysing the short stories in the 1970s. This research focuses on several novelists, particularly, Wanseo Park, Hyun Kim and Hajin Seo, who deal with everyday life in the apartment in the 1970s. The home is a literary space commonly found in innumerable novels. The home in the novels is not a background where the narrative is unfolded but is closely related to daily life, which explains a certain period and cultural analysis of the space. Moreover, this research also extends the theoretical context of this thesis by engaging with Western concepts of everyday life; it focuses on Lefebvre (1992), Rita Felski (2000) and Agnes Heller (1984) who deal with everyday life in the way of understanding space. These texts will be used as a framework to support this research. (Results) The apartment is generalised as a typical residential style of the industrialised city of the time and is described as uniformity and instability. Everyday life has changed while living in a completely different space of the apartment, and the apartment lost its symbolism as home. Through analysing the daily life in the apartment, however, this research found several significant issues: 1) the spatial organisation and particular functions in the apartment have developed by Koreans habitual activity, and 2) space is also utilised by Korean social practice, which impacts on spatial perception and attitudes toward the home, and the practices continuously carry on in the contemporary context. (Conclusions) Through analysing these resources, this research discovered several important factors about the apartment that relate to Korean daily life. Short stories described the apartment as a place, which is disconnected from the traditional houses, focusing on the physical aspects of the apartment. Although architectural changes influence on a significant element of Koreans' daily life, space was newly formed and developed through patterns of daily life, socially established. New forms gradually become familiar and are embodied in the form of another everyday space.