Reclaiming Environmental Narrative in Yun Ko-eun’s The Disaster Tourist

Abstract

In Yun Ko-eun’s The Disaster Tourist (2013), a third-person narrator constructs a unique storyworld through the spatial mobility of Yona Kim, the programme manager for Jungle, a cutthroat travel agency which specializes in holiday trips to disaster zones. Through the repackaging and commodifying of environmental calamities, Jungle travel agents move across national borders. By tracing Yona’s spatial itinerary that connects South Korea to Vietnam, the novel explores the ways in which capitalism transforms human lives and natural disasters into narratives of capital, while at the same time offering readers the possibility of resistance to the totalizing storyworld of capital. Through the construction of an alternative future storyworld, The Disaster Tourist encourages readers to rethink the relationship between the human and natural environments in the present.