War, Fragmentation of Memory, and Autofiction: Marguerite Duras’ and Park Wan-Suh’s Rewriting

초록

This article aims to examine the literary characteristics of autofiction as shaped through repetitive "rewriting" by conducting a comparative analysis of the autobiographical writings of Marguerite Duras and Park Wan-Suh. Both authors repeatedly recount the same events ― centered on childhood and war experiences — while transforming them in different ways each time. This narrative strategy reveals a key feature of autofiction, which emphasizes the evolving truth of the subject rather than the factual authenticity presupposed by traditional autobiography. In Duras's case, World War II and the Holocaust are understood as events that cannot be represented through a single, coherent narrative, leading to a fragmented and repetitive mode of writing. Similarly, Park Wan-Suh portrays the horrors of the Korean War — an ideological civil conflict ― through personal experience, repeatedly reconstructing her brother's death and the absurdity of war in various works. This study demonstrates that the emergence of autofiction is closely linked to the impossibility of representing war memory, the ethical concerns raised in the aftermath of the Holocaust, and the socio-cultural transformations following 1968. Ultimately, their "same but different" repetitive narratives reveal the fragmentation of memory and the fluidity of the subject, while proposing new possibilities for autobiographical writing.

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