[KS] Re: Response to Jacqueline Pak

David McCann dmccann at fas.harvard.edu
Tue Feb 2 21:03:56 EST 1999


Also re collaboration as voluntary or not, to add another to Frank
Hoffmann's list, the short story Wings by Yi Sang has been read as a
portrait of the colonized mentality.  The main character/ narrator's
passivity, coupled with his stubborn refusal to acknowledge what his wife
is doing in the other room, is a part of that reading.  One can also raise
the question: The reader "knows" what is going on in the story, and will
feel impatient or superior with regard to the narrator because of that
knowledge or understanding.  If so, then doesn't the main character's
continuing refusal to acknowledge the actual state of things implicate the
reader, in 1930's Korea, in the same refusal to acknowldge the state of
things "outside" the story; namely, the Japanese colonization?

D. McCann




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