I have two research projects in the future. The first is on North Korean literature. I focus on North Korean society and its literature because I believe that this combined study can be a clue to explain the historical development of the entire Korean society. Simultaneously, it offers a comparative approach about forms of internalization of colonial experience among East Asian countries

I have been preparing for an article entitled "A Study of the Correlation between the Origin of North Korean Government and North Korean Literature" I will carry out research into the main ideologues involved in the development of juche, and analyze the North Korean novelists and their related novels. For the sake of this, I am also interested in exploring the proletarian literary movement of the colonial period in Korean intellectual history and literary history. So I will trace the flow of this literary movement that led to forming North Korean literature after partition of two Koreas, and the writers' activities in establishing the base of North Korean ideology.

For this, I will concentrate on the close connection between aesthetics and politics, the correlation of North Korean society and its literature. I believe that this multidisciplinary research can be a crucial clue to be able to explain the historical development of the entire North Korean society as well as North Korean literature.

The second research plan is to further develop the theme that I explored in my doctoral dissertation, "A Study of Park Sang-ryoong's Novels". The novelist Park Sang-ryoong created a very rare literary world in his works, which had no precedent in Korean literary history. He showed a unique narrative technique in his works based on religions such as Buddhism, Daoism, Christianity, and shamanism, and integrated these with material from myths, folktales, alchemical philosophy, Gnosticism and other sources. Among these materials that he used, I will focus especially on the role of Gnosticism in his thoughts and compare it with the use of the Gnostic heritage in Western literature. I will also explore his creation of a unique artificial language in his novels, his narrative method, his choice of female characters - they are usually described as prostitutes; his borrowing of a concept of salvation from the Bible, and his experimentation with genre in his attempt to combine the essay, the novel and poetry. My research therefore will include to a significant extent a comparative approach to literary study.