Comparative Analysis of the Imagery of Death in the Poetry of Kang Eunjo and Sylvia Plath

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-004-6_86How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Feminism; Kang Eunjo; Sylvia Plath; Comparison

Abstract

After World War II, feminism flourished, and ever more feminist authors began to emerge on the literary landscape. Although living in different cultural and social contexts, the Korean feminist poet Kang Eunjo and the American feminist poet Plath both chose to present a great deal of death imagery in their poetry. Kang Eunjo sees death as one of the positive processes in the life cycle, showing her discontent with patriarchy and determination to defy it. The death imagery in Plath’s poetry, on the other hand, while also expressing hatred for the patriarchal system, is more of a helpless choice for women under the oppression of the patriarchy. Although the meanings of the death imagery in both poems are different, they both show the oppression of women by the patriarchal system and their determination to resist it. Moreover, Kang Eunjo and Plath deconstruct the patriarchal culture of war through the death imagery in their poems, illustrating through a unique female perspective that war represents the irrational desires and ambitions of the patriarchal system. Through a comparative analysis of the imagery of death in the poetry of Kang Eunjo and Plath, this thesis reveals the post-World War II understanding of death and life by female poets in Korea and the United States, deconstructing the culture of war in patriarchy and explaining the unique meaning of death from a female perspective, which has positive implications for the development of feminism and the comparison of poetry between Korea and the United States.

Copyright

© 2023 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Keying Wang
PY  - 2023
DA  - 2023/03/01
TI  - Comparative Analysis of the Imagery of Death in the Poetry of Kang Eunjo and Sylvia Plath
BT  - Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Education, Language and Art (ICELA 2022)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 700
EP  - 706
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-004-6_86
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-004-6_86
ID  - Wang2023
ER  -