Organizer and Chair: Chris Hanscom, University of California, Los Angeles

Discussant: Jiwon Shin, University of California, Berkeley

The colonial period in Korea (1910-1945) is inextricably bound to questions of modernity and, in literary-historical terms, to the perception of a split between socially-engaged (realist) and art-for-art's-sake (modernist) literature. This panel proposes to question both the terms modernity and modernism and the often unclear relationship between the two in the colonial Korean context through readings of individual writers. Challenging conventional distinctions between realism and modernism and accepted accounts of the relationship between literary text and historical reality, we begin to restore to colonial writings their often erased historical complexity. Sunyoung Park analyzes Kim Namch'ôn's late-colonial period literary experiments, locating the historical origins of the gap between his critical advocacy of realism and his actual modernist literary practice in the material contradictions of everyday colonial reality. Jina Kim theorizes an apparent disjunction between the practice and ideology of literary modernity in Kim Kirim's poetry and criticism, working toward an understanding of the historical position of Korean modernism. And Chris Hanscom looks to the ironic structure of Kim Yujông's fictional works in an attempt to locate a critical response to a colonial reality that diminished the writer's capacity to say what he or she meant. Together these papers examine the complex material and discursive context in which Korean writers formulated their responses to colonial modernity, and question the terms and modes by which literary critics and historians today approach the literature of the past.

Chris Hanscom, University of California, Los Angeles

Kim Yujông's (1908-1937) fiction is frequently understood as comedic, filled with idiomatic, ribald language and presenting the reader with a "concave mirror" that depicts the destitute reality of rural life in 1930s Korea via a humorous style. Many critics consequently place Kim's fiction into genres typically understood as designating socially-engaged and realistic writing, such as farm-village fiction (nongch'on munhak) or literature of local color (hyangt'o munhak). In this paper I instead attempt to read Kim as a modernist writer, where modernism is understood as both a crisis or breakdown in representation and as a reaction, a critique of modernity itself. In one of Kim Yujông's only sustained treatments of literary theory, the author acknowledges the split between meaning and its representation and takes issue with the modernist privileging of expression over communication, form over content. I argue that Kim attempts to confront this well-known modern(ist) impasse through the use of irony, formally presenting in his fiction a dual structure of reality mirroring the discrepancy between reality and appearance that characterized the colonial experience and modernity at large. Reading Kim's work via both the rhetorical trope and philosophical stance of irony allows a subtle repositioning of this important writer in Korean literary history, and at the same time compels a reconsideration of modernism and the context of colonial modernity itself as essentially ironic.

Jina Kim, University of Pennsylvania

Many contemporary Korean literary scholars have bemoaned Kim Kirim’s (1908-?) 1930s modernist poetry as a failure for not having achieved the goals of "correctly" understanding and applying Western modernism. Furthermore, Kim is frequently accused of merely summoning the surface sensations of modernity in his artistic practice rather than putting forth an ideology of literary modernity in his poetry. Curiously, despite Kim’s apparent failures, he is still considered to be one of the leaders of the early 20^th century modernist movement. There are several reasons for Kim’s standing; however, I locate Kim’s success not so much as a poet but more as a critic and theorist. Thus, in this paper, I examine Kim Kirim’s literary criticism and theory of modernism in an attempt to elucidate the state and status of modernism in colonial Korea. Reading Kim’s critical writings from the 1930s, this paper considers the challenges of the historical position of modernism in colonial Korea. I will reconsider the standard perception of modernist literature’s failure in early 20^th century colonial Korea by arguing that Kim Kirim’s poetry and critical writings on modernism engage the conundrum of modernity and colonialism.

Sunyoung Park, Columbia University

After colonial authorities forced Kim Namch’ôn (1911~?) to recant socialist ideology, he channeled his activist energy into an aesthetic quest for a new narrative form. Although he advocated realism in his critical writings, in practice he produced many works which might be referred to as modernist, with such characteristics as fragmented narrative structure, the ambiguous narrator, and multiple points of view. My reading of Kim’s essays suggests that he conceived of realism as an aesthetic that would expose the future orientation of history through close descriptions of everyday life. He stopped short, however, of realizing this aesthetic ideal due to his inability to construct a unified vision of 1930s Korean society, which combined economic prosperity with political repression. I will argue that unfulfilled as his quest was, Kim Namch’ôn succeeded in providing an effective alternative to the contemporary cultural discourse of "overcoming modernity," which sought to exorcise the contradictions and uncertainties of modern life by reviving an imagined nativist cultural past. By insisting on realism, Kim maintained that the solution for the problems of modern life could be found only through a concrete analysis of the material reality of lived life.