Banca de DEFESA: MARIA GABRIELA WANDERLEY PEDROSA

INTERMEDIATE REFERENCES IN THE WRITING OF A VEGETARIANA, BY SOUTH KOREAN AUTHOR HAN KANG

The Vegetarian; intermediality; south korean contemporary literature

The present study had as general objective to analyze the representations of themes related to contemporary South Korean literature in the novel The Vegetarian (2007), by the author Han Kang, through the intermedia references woven throughout the three chapters that make up the work. Published in 2007 in South Korea, the book received the International Booker Prize in 2016 (9 years later), gaining attention due to Deborah Smith's translation into English. Amid the controversies over the edition not being faithful to the Korean author's writing, it is undeniable that this recognition raised Han Kang and The Vegetarian to a global apogee, causing the novel to be read and studied worldwide. Thus, in the West, despite being a contemporary novel, critical fortune already shows itself in a voluptuous development. Therefore, we believe that it is necessary to analyze the historical context to which the work and its author belong, and, for this, we use the field of study of intermediality to propose a reading exercise to the work The Vegetarian. Starting from a crossover of perspectives: diachronic, from the proposal of Müller (2012); and synchronic, based on the studies of Claus Clüver (1997; 2006; 2012) and Irina Rajewsky (2012a; 2012b); in addition to the interdisciplinary study outlined by Lars Elleström (2021). We also trace a path of reading intermediality both as a phenomenon that presents a complex historical network and as a category of analysis. In the mid-1960s, South Korea experienced dizzying changes in its historical, political, social, and economic fabrics, which reverberated in artistic production — especially in contemporary South Korean literature. Thus, we discuss from the study of Lee (2007), on the cultural hybridity in contemporary South Korean literature, and the use of the concept of "hybrid writing" – referring to the mixtures of literary texts with new cultural texts that were accessed by the authors within this new globalized era, the phenomenon of the Korean Wave — and the society of mass consumption, which induced the authors to think about themes such as the mutations of themes related to femininity, sexuality and violence produced by a post-industrial world. To build a more solid theoretical apparatus in relation to this historical and cultural path of contemporary South Korean literature, we rely on the studies of Cho, 2000; Yi et al., 2001; Kim, 2002; Lee, 2003; Elfving-Hwang; (2010); Kwon; Fulton, 2020. Therefore, from these considerations, we see that Han Kang discusses both issues that encompass the theme of femininity (the domestic environment, female sexuality, and motherhood), as well as discusses the consequences that human beings must sustain due to the advances of post-industrialization. Thus, we argue that these themes can be triggered in Han Kang's text from the intermedia references present in the novel. Therefore, we consider this novel a happy example of an amalgam of what contemporary South Korean literature has to offer the reader, and The Vegetarian, the quintessence of Han Kang's aesthetic project.