Nineteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

Using Derrida’s conception of spectrality, this paper explores the motif of arrival and arrivant in Anna Kim’s novels. In doing so, the narrative strategies come into focus. The narrative strategies are essential in Anna Kim’s The Great Homecoming and Frozen Time as they allow us to analyze the connections between the hauntings in the individual’s life and the multifaceted hauntings in the larger context of historical space. In The Great Homecoming, the story of the protagonist Hanna, born in Korea and adopted by German parents, who, as a proxy figure, goes in search of her origins) is connected with the complex history of South Korea (life in the civil war, violence, oppression, and the terror of opinion in North and South Korea, and the takeover by the Pak regime) with the overall historical constellations of the Cold War. Frozen Time explores the spectral experience of a Red Cross worker who coordinates the identification of bodies in Pristina, Kosovo, many of which were found in mass graves, and later returns to Vienna and conducts archival research of data on ghostly disappearances. Her story is, therefore, also closely linked to a specific historical reality: the hauntings of the 1998-99 Kosovo war. Through the lens of hauntology, this paper examines various literary representations of the spectre, and with the homecoming and searches for family traces of a young woman in the haunted atmosphere of Seoul and conjures the spectres that lurk beneath the surface of the text.