Multiple beginnings: Crisis of gender, masculinity, nationhood, and many arrivals of modernity in modern Korean literature and cinema

My dissertation examines Korean fiction and cinema from the period that spans from the 1920s to the 1960s to reveal the ways in which many arrivals of modernity in Korea, through the traumatic pathways and contexts of colonialism, decolonization, war, and industrialization destabilize and set in flux notions of gender, masculinity, and nationhood. It analyzes cultural responses of the nation in crisis, which the selected Korean literary and cinematic texts I study here reflect, and provides a reading of such texts through the lens of Western and Korean literary and cinematic discourses of gender, modernity, nationalism, and postcolonial conditions.; First, I delineate the connection between the idea of the nation as a unified entity and the ideal of a new Korean masculinity via Confucian patriarchal tradition, with its enduring hold on national imagination and culture. I argue that the state-sponsored rhetoric of a unified Korean subjectivity constructs a new masculine subject as its emblem, defined by colonial modernity in the colonial era, and later by militarism and westernization in the postcolonial period. The masculine subject is thus strongly identified with the nation itself. Since colonization, this subject shares with the nation a certain consciousness of being under the threat of emasculation. The threat to the national sovereignty and state-sponsored masculinity ideal---whether experienced or imagined---impacts nationalist discourses in colonial literature, the nation's attitude towards modernity and women's connection to it, its narrative of postcolonial nation rebuilding, and its postcolonial debates on the conceptualization of the nation and gender ideals.; The texts I investigate show that even while the narratives continually negate their voice and individuality, and hence their humanity, women struggle to claim agency, ultimately making a space for a non-monolithic, non-masculinity discourse of gender and nation. The precarious position that woman occupies in the nation in crisis is more visible in the marginality of the figures I study; the state-sponsored patriarchy's response to a national threat via violence against women, and the literary and cinematic representations of such, yield fruitful discussions on the complex nature of the relationship between the nation, modernity, gender, and power.