The Narratives of Mobility in Literary Texts : Three Types of Novels in Korea and Japan

Abstract

This paper focuses on how the narrative technique relates to mobility in Korean and Japanese literature. In general, pure, diaspora, and multicultural literature are heavily armed with ideological foundations and premised on being read on their own terms. However, what commonalities and differences in these thematic areas would arise if the motif of mobility supplanted other interpretive modes in the novels? This study analyzes how the mobile subject shaped the characteristics of each era through movement. It aims to refine the reading of modern novels aimed at establishing the modernity of the subject, diaspora novels in the Cold War era, and novels in the 2000s characterized by the theme of multiculturalism. Thus, this paper pointed out that the establishment of modern novels was triggered by movement and then examined how the lives of the diaspora in the Cold War era were narrated from the ethical point of view of mobility. Furthermore, the multicultural situation of globalism further amplified this phenomenon after the Cold War.