UC Riverside

My dissertation analyzes the youth representations in 1960s and 1970s literature, popular music, film, and discourse using interdisciplinary research. Beyond the demographic category as a part of society, youth is a modern symbolic signifier; it has been politically or culturally separated from and opposed to the existing society, while it has integrated and represented the entire society in a way that appropriates the future of the society. Thus, the representation of youth can be defined as a society's constitutive exception and metonymy. In South Korea, which belatedly began modernization, the challenge of modern nation-building and various ideas about modernization were mainly submitted through representations of youth. These representations were also significant because they contained common sentiments and affects that were the remnants and scars of the compressed modernization. First, I demonstrate how the youth representations combined with the student vanguard concept reveal the postcolonial challenges of the localization of Western modernity and South Korea’s belated attempts to catch-up to the modernization of the Western world. Then, I explore the way popular music and films created a shared structure of feeling and imagined a united society at a time when the gaps between class and gender increased in South Korean society through an analysis of the changing representations of lower-class young men and poor young women. Finally, the last chapter reveals how the autobiographical memoirs of young female factory workers in the late 1970s changed the symbolic function of youth and raised the question about the artistic norm of literature by embodying common sentiments and breaking the student vanguard concept. Together, the youth representations in various media constitute the epistemological and affective landscape of the developmental dictatorship and provide a social imagination of contemporary South Korean society.