Rereading History in Han Kang’s Human Acts
This paper, “Rereading History in Han Kang’s Human Acts,” investigates the Gwangju Uprising of 1980 in South Korea as depicted in Han Kang’s novel. The Gwangju Uprising, a peaceful protest that escalated into a massacre, involved significant civilian casualties. The book narrates this event through diverse perspectives, including children, civilians, soldiers, and even corpses, creating an overarching story of “acts” united by location and time. The significance of this paper lies in expanding comparative studies on Korean literature by examining intertextuality, interdiscursivity, and intermediality in Han Kang’s work, an area rarely explored in South Korean writing scholarship. Using a qualitative descriptive research method, the study analyzes how the uprising is represented, employing representation theory to understand how historical events are disseminated as social stories. The findings highlight that discussions of the Gwangju Uprising consistently raise questions about civil society’s role in a democratic nation-state. The novel emphasizes history’s tendency to repeat, reflecting on the Gwangju Uprising, echoing contemporary civil order collapses in South Korea. Ultimately, the paper concludes that exploring the Gwangju Uprising in modern South Korea is a reciprocal writing process, revisiting a “failed script” through various texts and collective acts of remembrance.
Keywords: Gwangju Uprising, Human Acts, Interdiscursivity, Intermediality, Intertextuality, Representation, Theory, Trauma
