Possibility beyond Possibility: Discovering the traces of the non-spatial diaspora in Korean Literature

This study examines South Korea as a space of diaspora experiencing non-spatial immigration of language, structure, and name. Undergoing the Japanese colonial rule, the liberation, the military occupation of the United States and the Soviet Union, and the Korean War, Korea experienced extreme changes of how they should talk, how they should live, and how they should be called. However, South Korea under strong dictatorships lasted for decades after the war, in the critical needs for a single and united identity as a nation competing against the idea of developing Asia as a whole, suppressed the trace of the internal diaspora manifested in the practical lives of the people not limited to those who actually had migrated from and to this peninsular. Although there were significant and critical studies on how oppressively the dictatorial censorship worked on the people and how blindly they identified themselves with the given role in the society despite their will was against of the rule, the vestiges of the internal diaspora which remained in literary writings were left unexplored yet. This study aims to discover the traces of non-spatial immigration carved in the writings from 1960s to 1980s in South Korea and examine how the vestiges became a seed of powerful thoughts of infinite possibilities, also called "freedom." Poems and critical writings of Kim, Soo-Young, criticisms of Kim, Hyun, and a poet Jeong Hyun-Jong will be examined significantly with the Derridian thoughts of "possibility beyond possibility".