Abstract
The exploration of the spatial structure of a particular urban area, or the analysis of the tendencies of spatial consumption among urbanites, can be a literary-geographical attitude, shifting literary interests toward geography. It may also constitute a field of cultural geography that reads texts as cultural symbols. Based on this kind of attitude, the paper reads the literature of Park Wan So, particularly the popular novels that involve urban and residential spaces of Seoul, as a cultural text that carries a kind of symbolism. It proceeds with the idea that most popular novels reflect the mass phenomena of its times, and that representing real cultural experiences through text, it becomes a means of generalizing the identity shared by the anonymous masses and the characteristics of particular places. Hence the individuality of Park Wan So, who moved to Seoul during the Japanese colonial period and hence forth lived as a middle-class citizen, is inseparable from her literary work. With this attitude and methodology, the paper argues that in the urban space of metropolitan Seoul, the modern ambivalent gaze of the colonial period shifted toward increasingly new value systems, and was replaced by a dichotomous view, and furthermore, that the contents of this dichotomous view has experienced a multivalent transformation through the accumulation of time and the expansion of space.