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Dreams of the Downtrodden: Tragicomic Miss Teletubby by Kang Young-sook scrap
by Kang Dongho
October 27, 2014
Author Bio 작가 소개
Kang Young-sook
Recipient of the 2025 Arts Council Korea Literature Fellowship
Kang Young-sook is a feminist South Korean author. She often writes about the female grotesque, delving into varying genres, such as urban noir, fantasy, and climate fiction. Since her debut in 1998, she has published a number of novels and short story collections, and has received many prestigious awards, such as the Hanguk Ilbo Literature Prize, Kim Yujeong Literary Award, and Lee Hyo-seok Literature Award, among others.
She participated in the International Writing Program’s fall residency at the University of Iowa in 2009, and was also a visiting writer-in-residence at UC Berkeley in 2014. In November 2019 she was writer in residence at Dragon Hall in Norwich.
Tragicomic Miss Teletubby is Kang Young-sook’s seventh published book and third novel; it is another excellent example of the author’s hardboiled point of view of the anxiety present in everyday city life. In this work Kang depicts the romance of a man named Dong-seok, manager of the Korean branch of a multinational electronics company, and a 16-year-old girl named Hana, who carries a Teletubby doll everywhere. These two are not an ordinary couple, however, but locked in a material relationship based on money that is doomed to fail from the beginning. While their relationship may look like a destructive coupling of the upper and lower classes of the urban society they live in, there is too much to it to be dismissed as an unethical, antisocial crime.
On the surface level Dong-seok and Hana are unquestionably engaged in underage prostitution, but between the two of them they create a private space that is invisible from the viewpoint of society. Needless to say, this relationship is not a sustainable one. It can only end in disaster, but rather than investigate the knotty ethics of this relationship the author chooses to focus on Hana’s coping mechanism, namely her desire to write.
As the story traces Hana’s footsteps, it is revealed that writing helps her bear the crushing loneliness and deprivation in her life. She desires to imagine a world beyond her reality. Of course, the desire to write does not solve the problems of reality in one swoop. It does, however, hold a mirror up to the dehumanization of city living that makes up our everyday life, and forces us to reflect on the downtrodden dreams of those brutally excluded from the establishment.
Is it possible to imagine a different kind of future for mankind under this system of capitalism that shows no sign of change? Kang Young-sook’s novel dreams of a different kind of life beyond this reality, a vision driven by the celebration of female solidarity and a belief in the power of writing to connect and comfort.
Writer 필자 소개
Kang Dongho
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