This thesis was written to grasp Seoul space in the 1970s through Jo Seon-jak’s full-length novel Miss Yang’s Adventure (1975) from the subjects’ compositional aspect.
Miss Yang’s Adventure is the work in which Seoul city space in the 1970s is embodied with place names written accurately. Jo Seon-jak, the author of this work, was of the group of writers such as Choi In-ho, Song Yeong, Hwang Seok-yeong, Jo Hae-il, who were the most noteworthy writers in the 1970s. In this work, the events that heroine Yang Eun-ja underwent as she left her home town Chungnam NonSan and came up to Seoul. Simultaneously, the process, in which women subjects in the 1970s constituted capitalistic consuming subjects, was grasped. When desire is formed voluntarily, it contributes to the vitalization of capitalist microscopic power. The subjects actively connect desire with the image of modern capitalism and set the rise of status or affluent consumption as their own task. In a different sense, it also can be seen that the subjects are formed through the work of life power.
This work juxtaposes city space experiences with the subject composition and shows well the fact that life power of cities works in the mechanism of exclusion and inclusion. In the core, there is the way in which the capitalistic exchange value is integrated. City women subordinate subjects entered into the inside of life power by accepting ‘commercialization of the body.’ Life power adopted a circulating system in which it made the city itself become a camp, produced survivors in the storm of modernization, and accommodated them in the camp. Through this, it created circumstances which made modern capitalism continue as exception status.
Miss Yang’S Adventure well grasped the fact that modern capitalistic life power composed the subjects in the course of forming cities. The writer paid attention to ‘the particular’ with a realist attitude, and this kind of writer’s attitude played an important role in embodying ‘the effectiveness of power amid actually existing concrete events.’ This work shows that there is a possibility of resistance inside the inner workings by embodying the life power in Korea in the 1970s. Since subjects are composed by city space and at the same time the nature of city space also can be changed by subjects, the possibility of the subjects’ resistance still holds good.