The purpose of this article is to examine the changes in the environment of Korean literary creation in the transition from the 1990’s to the 2000’s, and consequent practical conditions of creation. It shed light on the nature and aspects of the creation in accordance with the foundations and changes of the media of creation in the period of digital media in the 2000’s via the creative works by the current author and other young novelists in the 2000’s.
The environment for the publication of literary works including novels in the 2000’s falls within the traditional printing media and the Internet media. After showing their new works to literary enthusiasts via these two forms of publication, recent writers meet common readers with their monographs. The aspects of webzines are divided into the 2000’s early form and later form. The current author’s short novels I Have Seen Flowers and Flower Viewing were published in Inswords and Pencil, webzines opened in the early 2000’s. These works are characteristic in that their contents are contracted appropriately to the Internet environment and that they have compressed narratives. Also, based on poetic tension, they have maximal effects (aftertaste, emotional charge, creation of fantasy) with minimal letters (the compressed narrative). After all, they have minimalist tendencies. Before and after 2010, succeeding Inswords and Pencil, new webzines appeared that were operated by Internet bookshops, Internet portals, and publishing companies. Those young writers who have been leading the realm of Korean novels before and after 2010 published their works in monographs after serializing them in these webzines. The current author’s My Man’s Book is a full-length novel serialized in Ppul, a webzine published by the Internet bookshop, Aladin. This novel pursues the traces of Antonin Artaud, the founder of the theater of cruelty with a culture reporter from an economy newspaper as the central character. This novel has strongly prominent aspects of infotainment as it uses the digital media environment.
Novels have undergone changes in their functions as the digital media environment has been realized as a basis for life and literature. Korean writers in the 2010’s are shaping new flows of narratives while challenging and responding the digital media literature environment represented by webzines. Various features are created based on individual writers’ characteristics with the prominence of the mixing and extension of genre literature.