Post-Genre Tendencies and Challenges in Korean Young Adult Fiction: Focusing on Agamben’s Concept of Impotentiality

Since the beginning of the 21st century, Young Adult (YA) fiction has established itself as one of the most dynamic narrative genres. In particular, Anglophone YA fiction in the fantasy and science fiction genres—most notably The Hunger Games—has addressed the formation and resistance of youth subjectivity under oppressive systems through the form of popular narrative, and has even been regarded as a cultural phenomenon. Recent Korean young adult novels show a de-genre-ization tendency that mixes the term “YA fiction” or borrows its outward form. However, Korean young adult fiction, since the 1990s, has been rooted in an Enlightenment-oriented character and the Bildungsroman tradition derived from children’s literature, functioning at times as an instrumental narrative that risks incorporating young readers into a meritocratic system. This study, focusing on Agamben’s concept of impotentiality, diagnoses the formation process and narrative limitations of Korean young adult fiction as distinct from YA fiction, infers and categorizes recent characteristics of YA fiction through representative works, and examines how the concept of impotentiality in YA fiction can become a narrative ethic for Korean young adult literature. This paper critically examines how the network of “publishing industry-education system-academia-authors-(parental) consumers” in which Korean young adult fiction is situated alienates young readers from youth narratives. It warns that, in this situation, if Korean young adult fiction remains at a superficial de-genre-ization that merely adopts the outward appearance of YA fiction, it may result in threatening the ethical existence of the youth subject. The characteristics of YA fiction found in representative works such as The Hunger Games, Divergent, and Ender’s Game can be summarized as the anti-Bildungsroman, genre orientation, and impotentiality, and in particular, in light of Agamben’s theory, the narratives of YA fiction function as stories of ethical decision and resistance in which the youth subject strives to maintain impotentiality, presenting narrative possibilities different from a reality that forces a single path of growth. Accordingly, this study emphasizes the need for Korean young adult fiction to move beyond market-driven genre fusion toward a genuine postmodern narrative of subjectivity, calling for both narrative and educational transformation.