Clenched and Empty Fists

Trauma and Resistance Ethics in Han Kang’s Fiction

Bibliographic Data

ID20249085
AuthorsShannon Finck (0000-0002-2328-2050, Georgia State University, corresponding author)
Year2022
Volume11
Issue6
Pages149
Publication date2022-12-05
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueHumanities (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2076-0787 • E-ISSN: 2076-0787
PublisherMDPI AG (PUBLISHER • IT)
DOI10.3390/h11060149
OpenAlexW4311626854
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited14

Broadly speaking, the literary history of human–nonhuman metamorphoses conveys certain ethics regarding human-to-human relations by mediating these relations through metaphors of inhumanity. Where such transformations appear in the literature of the present, however, the human is often decentered, fostering an uneasy consort between human and nonhuman beings and ways of being. Taking the fiction of South Korean author, Han Kang, as a case study, this essay examines the political or civic value of reinvigorating vegetal or arboreal transformation in contemporary stories that unfold against a backdrop of global climate change and ecological collapse. I argue that Han’s work depicts the mimicry of or engagement with nonhuman forms of life as both passive strategies for resisting human acts of violence and exploitation and alternative models of sociality and care. Drawing especially on the unruliness of plants and non-animal organic matter, Han’s translated works invite readers to consider what human subjects can learn about both individual and networked, interspecies modes of protest from green subjectivity

Aesthetics · Art · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Literature · Political ethics · Political science · Politics · Sociality · Sociology · Subjectivity · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Law · Philosophy · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism · Ecology

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