Session 30: Literature of the Haebang konggan

Organizer and Chair: Bruce Fulton, University of British Columbia

Discussant: Scott Swaner, University of Washington

The Haebang konggan is, strictly speaking, the period from August 15, 1945, when the Korean peninsula was liberated from Japanese colonial rule, to the formation three years later of the Republic of Korea and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea; in the Korean literature field the end date is sometimes extended to the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950. The term Haebang konggang means "post-Liberation space"; the designation is apt, for the literature of this time exists in a virtual vacuum in English-language scholarship on Korean literature. One reason for this is that Haebang konggan literature is to a large extent the literature of the wôlbuk chakka, the 100-odd "gone-north writers" whose migration from southern to northern Korea from 1945 to 1950 effectively removed them from consideration by South Korean scholars—due to the prevailing National Security Laws—until the democratization movement in South Korea in 1987. Equally important, the space for ideological discourse in the 1945–1948 period was unprecedented in the history of early-modern Korea, so that Korean-language scholarship on the literary history of the Haebang konggan has tended to emphasize the competing ideologies of writers; analysis of individual writers and their works published during this period is by comparison underrepresented. Our purpose in this panel is to consider or reconsider four major writers of twentieth-century Korea—Yôm Sangsôp (1897–1963), Kim Yôngnang (1903–50), Sô Chôngju (1915–2000), and Hwang Sunwôn (1915–2000)—and to examine how the circumstances of the Haebang konggan may have shaped their work both at that time and thereafter.

Kim Yôngnang’s Later Poetry

Ann Y. Choi, Rutgers University

As one of the founders of the Shimunhak (Poetry) journal in 1930, Kim Yôngnang debuted on the stage of sunsu shi (pure poetry), which purportedly stood in opposition to the rise of purpose-driven leftist literature. His poetry for the most part marked by attention to rhythm and sounds and devoid of message or document, the poet himself is said to have achieved a high level of sophistication in the revelation of "the extraordinary moment"; Kim’s "southern rhythms" (alluding to his use of local dialect) are seen as standing next to and complementing Kim Sowôl’s (1902–1934) "northern rhythms." Such is the attempt made by some post-Liberation critics to unite the two halves of the peninsula via limiting the function of the lyric form to the nationalist cause; others fault the poet for his lack of political consciousness. By examining the poems that Kim Yôngnang wrote during the last five years of his life vis-à-vis his active, if inconsistent, socio-political life, this paper aims to bring critical light to the simplified assessment of the poet as a bourgeois escaping history or a songbird doing his part to build his nation.

Political Subtext in Hwang Sunwôn’s Mongnômi maûl ûi kae

Bruce Fulton, University of British Columbia

This paper is part of an ongoing endeavor to reassess the significance of Hwang Sunwôn in the development of short fiction in modern Korea. Hwang’s short fiction has long been interpreted on the basis of an ill-defined notion of aesthetics according to which he is often pigeonholed as an exemplar of lyricism and romanticism, an author who rarely dealt at length with the realities of Korean history and society in the manner of, for example, socially engaged fiction writing of the 1970s. The Mongnômi maûl ûi kae (The Dog of Crossover Village, 1948) short-story collection, though, reveals an author who is strikingly contemporary in terms of his thematic concerns, sophisticated worldview, and multifaceted narrative style. Belying the propensity in existing scholarship to categorize Hwang as a practitioner of pure literature (rather than a socially engaged writer), six of the seven stories in this collection reflect the turbulent social and political circumstances of the Haebang konggan. This should not be surprising, for there is ample evidence in Hwang’s life and works that he had a highly developed social and political consciousness. The title story (1947) is especially rich in political subtext: it can be read as an allegory of Korean fears of outsiders (whether the Japanese colonizers or the more recent occupants of the Korean peninsula, the USSR and the U.S.). An analysis of this collection is necessary to provide a more balanced view—and one that is long overdue—of modern Korea’s most important writer of short fiction.

From Flesh to Spirit: Sô Chôngju’s Aesthetic Shift during the Haebang konggan

Mickey Hong, UCLA

The project of establishing a new national literature began as soon as Korea was liberated. The confrontation between ideology and purity groups was revived in the debate over how to purge colonial influence and restore Korean consciousness. The writers regained their artistic freedom, but they were split over the direction of Korean literature as they had been in the 1920s. The Left/Right dichotomy reemerged the summer Sô Chôngju (Midang, 1915–2000) died, and critics both condemned his lack of political engagement and defended his artistic merit. The controversy reminds us that colonial manifestations remain in Korean literary discourse.

Sô’s prolific career expanded over half a century and his work underwent various poetic transformations, but my paper examines the first and major change from his debut collection, Hwasa chip (Flower Snake, 1938) to his second work, Kwich’okto (The Cuckoo, 1946). His early poetry exuding Baudelairian desire and rebellion were replaced by a traditional aesthetic. The second collection indulges in conventional sentiments yet embodies political reality. The post-Liberation leftist poets wanted to sever themselves from the past and rationalized their work as nation-building. The value of Sô’s poetic realm, although romanticized, was that it rediscovered Korean characteristics by invoking antiquity. Among the focuses of my discussion are the historical devastation by external powers forming Korea’s literary culture, and Sô as a leading modernist who was suddenly forced to imagine a new poetry of the nation’s experience and hope.

Securing the National Home in Yôm Sangsôp’s Hyop’ung

Theodore Hughes, Columbia University

The end of Japanese colonial rule in August 1945 was accompanied by rapid changes in the Korean literary scene. Writers associated with the opposing leftist and nationalist camps of the 1920s and early 1930s emerged either from self-imposed silence or collaboration with the colonial regime during the Greater East Asian War to confront a new order imposed on the peninsula: dual military occupations (U.S. in the South; USSR in the North) and the threat of a lasting national division. This paper locates Yôm Sangsôp’s Hyop’ung (Dawn Wind, 1948) as part of the post-1945 rearticulation of colonial-period left-right debates, examining in particular the ways in which the text turns to Yôm’s earlier production of an ethical, nationalist bourgeois subjectivity in Samdae (Three Generations, 1931) not only to once more counter the left, but also to figure the U.S. military occupation as a continuing form of colonial power.

Both Samdae and Hyop’ung appropriate the detective novel form. If Yôm’s task in Samdae is to construct knowing subjects who will secure the national home by simultaneously negotiating class conflict and outwitting the repressive forces of the colonial state, Hyop’ung seeks to produce a postcolonial subject that both rejects the North as offering an inauthentic, totalitarian modernity and transforms what emerges in the text as the orientalist gaze of the U.S. occupation into an object of investigation.