Money’s power, voluntary identification, and people pushed out

Products that keep changing as time passes, and the dazzling means of money, satisfy a human desire to consume and offer pleasure, this reading writes, while covering over realistic gaps. That action of a late-capitalist age cannot be confirmed with the eye; through voluntary identification it binds the subject to capital and power and turns the subject into an other.

The largest problem of a society in which the power of money holds and shakes every area, they say, is that the logic of capital comes even into culture and the personal sphere. Critique and alternative thought become hard, and human values and hope are trampled. Polarization between those who have money and power and those who do not grows deeper, and people pushed from the core of power, who suffer outside capitalism, are left in pain.

Those pushed out of capitalist reality, in this telling, are not only workers once set against capitalists. The circle widens to women, the unemployed, irregular workers, death-row inmates, and people with disabilities. Anyone, this reading adds, might be pushed out and held down; a shared feeling of that kind is said to have let Gong Ji-young’s concern for suffering others reach many people and have a social effect.

Gong Ji-young, Our Happy Time, and a 1990s–2000s realism

A critique is recorded that, in the late-capitalist era, literature itself became bound to capitalism and could not portray society as a whole. Many 1990s Korean novels, this reading says, retreated into private life or into the pleasure of mass culture. Even so, realism that made visible contradictions in several areas of late-capitalist society did not break off, and some works still tried to show the lives of people who were suffering.

Gong Ji-young’s fiction is said to have come through the climate of the 1980s and, on the basis of a sharp recognition of 1990s reality, to appear as realism in several directions. This reading will look at the reality her novels across the 1990s and 2000s tried to show, and, through Our Happy Time, at the social meaning and role of a literary work that looks for a social change able to overcome the gaps made by capitalism. The plot of that novel is not filled in beyond the title this reading names.

Stories of women, of death-row inmates, and of people with disabilities, they write, are epics, in several parts, of people who suffer because of contradictions in reality. Gong’s novels are also called work that leads a path of reform in the society around them, and that literary achievement is said to be worth examining. Those claims stay in the literary frame of the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s.

After the IMF crisis, micro-narratives, and a named feminism

Before the 1990s, this reading says, interest was mainly in the capitalist and the worker. Afterward, interest turned to people at the margins of power. After the IMF crisis, polarization brought new others: irregular workers, young unemployed people, and the homeless. Those groups are named in the wake of that crisis, and are not recast as later official social totals.

Fiction after the 1990s, they write, changed from grand narratives to micro-narratives, from social history to personal history, and from the world of the nation and the minjung to the dimension of citizens or the masses, rediscovering other people who had been pushed to the edge of the age. In the same stretch, peripheral literature such as feminist novels and fantasy novels rose. Even then, realist novels that made contradictions in several areas of late-capitalist society did not come to an end.

Features that appear in realism, this reading adds, appear in feminist novels as well. A Korean feminism is named as a means that can wake a consciousness of the problem in women bound by a patriarchal society, form public opinion, and, joined to literature, turn that problem into a social one. The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. Notes on late-capitalist society in the late twentieth century and on a turn in the 1990s, read through Korean fiction.
2. Money’s power, voluntary identification, polarization, and a widened circle of people pushed out, including women, irregular workers, death-row inmates, and people with disabilities.
3. Gong Ji-young’s 1980s–2000s realism and Our Happy Time, named without an invented plot; the IMF-crisis others; micro-narratives; and a named Korean feminism, left in that literary frame.

Last updated: 14 November 2026