Author ORCID Identifier

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2504-4398

Date of Award

Summer 6-11-2025

Document Type

Thesis (Undergraduate)

Department

Comparative Literature

First Advisor

Klaus Mladek

Second Advisor

Min Young Godley

Abstract

The 1980 Gwangju Uprising is a significant event in contemporary South Korean political history. In the decades following, "Gwangju literature" has provided an avenue for representation, narrativization, and encounter with the event. South Korean author Han Kang is another writer of the Uprising, and her 2014 novel Human Acts returns to the site of injury in order to open up the event to the larger histories of sovereignty, civil conflict, and war that it localizes in Gwangju, 1980.

This thesis seeks to leverage the way the novel draws upon the sacred and the religious to call upon Gwangju. I argue that Human Acts accesses a non-sovereign sense of the sacred through ritual and literary testimony, ultimately disturbing sovereign history and time to create a vision of human dignity that persists after its destruction. This broadly occurs through a three-part process: first, the author takes on the role of shaman or spirit medium, initiating a plural ritual. These narrative rituals then facilitate literary testimony, effectively reenacting and repossessing the event of Gwangju. As testimony bridges the realms of before and after, sacred and profane, it retraces a topology of human dignity. Through testimony, the novel returns to the moment where dignity becomes visible—the moment of its destruction.

Somewhere within repeated ritual, Gwangju approaches what Walter Benjamin names the now-time in its chain of signification. As “omnipotent wound,” or repeated injury, Gwangju is not only excepted from the past but shot into the present, transfecting it. Following the original Korean title of the novel, 소년이 온다 (“The Boy Comes” or “The Boy Approaches”), Human Acts ultimately mobilizes the past. Through ritual, the novel constructs the memory of an absolute community—a momentary collective that has the potential to enter at any moment.

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