Environmental Perception of the ‘Anthropocene’ through Korean Literature in the 2000’s: Centered on Pyun Hye-young’s novel and Yu Hyung-jin’s poem

The concept of “Anthropocene” first proposed in 2000 by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer, is currently evaluated by the International Commission on Stratigraphy(ICS) as imminent to declare it as an official geological era. However, this solidifies its status as a geological era division, and cannot be seen as meaning that conceptualization in the humanities and social sciences has been completed. In particular, in the field of literary criticism, how this concept relates to existing ecological criticism and how it appears has not been studied. The discourse on what form and content the sensitivity of an era emerges is bound to be formalized and acute after some distance from that era. In this paper, we would like to conduct a literary critique on the characteristics that are mutually related to periodic recognition of “Anthropocene”, one of the ‘environmental perception’ characteristically found in literary works in the 2000s. The ‘environmental awareness’ of writers in the 2000s is embodied by unique rhetorical characteristics such as ‘multi-voice’ or ‘lack of purpose’. The ‘multi-voice’ and ‘lack of purpose’ of literature in the 2000s were often regarded as postmodern general characteristics or a retreat to materialism. However, if we accept the concerns of the ‘Anthropocene’, this phenomenon is understood as a way to protect their own environmental awareness, which is essentially not different from the existing ecological ethics, at a crossroads where ecological modernism cannot but be compromised.