VIOLENCE AND SPACES OF MOURNING IN HAN KANG’S NOVELISTIC WORK

Abstract

Han Kang is one of the studied writers who bear witness through her characters, who live in ultra-violent contexts, to the adaptive psychological responses to traumatic environments. We can study, through these testimonies in literature, the voice of historically invisible women who suffer from the consequences of contextual and systemic violence that vexes and humiliates them in these environments. South Korea is a country with a complex political context and a contemporary history that chains a colonization, a civil war, several military mandates and assassination of civilians in the last hundred years. Just as men are the active subject of violence and have been associated with its direct consequences on the psyche (trauma-related disorders of the personality and mood, and at the collective level, a male society which promotes violence); women have been little studied and reduced to be a passive subject: they do not make war, they wait.

With her pseudo-fiction, the writer reconstructs the events, the female memory and gives a space to her characters to integrate the endless mourning.