Voices of the new woman in colonial Korea : generic and linguistic interplay in the construction of self-narratives

Abstract

In this study, I draw upon the theory of critical languages study, in order to demonstrate the ways in which discourses and genres are involved in the construction of a text for the purpose of signifying a social reality from a particular perspective. Through the process of producing a text, the use of language determines the way of mapping out conflicting and contradictory discourses into various genres of everyday practice. In analyzing the text, which has been glossed as a woman's self-narrative and a fictional construction of self-narrative by a male writer, Yem Sang-sep, in the 1920s and 1930s, I will specifically look at the mixture of genres in the creation of the text for the purpose of reproducing or changing the social norms of gender and sexuality. A competing construction of social reality is made through discourse practice in texts, which can go against and also collaborate with expectations of the social norms of gender and sexuality that circumscribe the concepts of the New Woman, free love, chastity, and motherhood. My analysis will demonstrate how self-narratives of the New Woman articulate new ideas of womanhood in association with or in opposition to patriarchal ideology, by drawing upon the various genres in the constitution of the text. In the analysis of the way in which the discursive formation of different social reality is formed in the mixture of heterogeneous genres, my focus will be on linguistic features as an influence constitutive of the generic structure genre.