암흑기 시문학 재고(再考) = A Reconsideration of Korean Poetry in the Dark Periodof Japanese Imperialism

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

In most literary histories, ‘the Korean Language Society affair(1942)’ is the beginning of the Dark Period of the Japanese Imperialism. This is because the conditions for the reproduction of the imaginary world through the national language of Hangul were closed from the possibility level. The literary history of the Dark Period is written as a binary opposition of cooperation and resistance, or described under the exclamation mark. This way of looking at literary history during the Japanese occupation is based on the logic of retroactive meaning. It is a firmly present perspective, with retrospective insights based on the apparent finality of the future event of the Liberation. Based on the desire to reconstruct the final state that Korean literature would have achieved in the absence of Japanese domination, it is important to note that literary history is necessarily a thin description of events. In the first place, the rhetoric of the Dark Period carries the perspective of colonial empires such as Germany and Japan. The rhetoric of the Dark Period comes from the perspective of colonial empires like Germany and Japan. For the colonizer, it was a time of foreclosure; for the colonized, it was a time of repression. By naming it the Dark Period, the colonizer returns to the colonized the signifiers it has repressed. The origins of the Dark Period can be traced back to the Manchu Revolt. The Manchurian Incident is a symbolic event that marked the outbreak of ‘the Greater East Asia[Daitoa]’ ideology. The 15-year war period from 1931 to Japan’s defeat in 1945 can also be defined as the Dark Period. This is because the entire process of visualizing the “one” that had been forcibly merged into the “greater one” order of the Greater East Asia is a metaphor for the Dark Period. The fascistic coherence of the empire is rescued from the internal difference of ‘Joseon’, ‘the absolute denial of Joseon’. The idea of nation, lost in the first place, is renamed in accordance with the ethical call for the realization of the nation-state. The Korean language and Korean literature become objects of erasure and preservation at the same time. National literature is imperial literature, and like the logic of ‘Daitoa’, the moment it is uttered, the logic of conversion is at work. However, this is not possible. The colonized experience modernity as a lack of modernity. The nation, too, is incarnated in the absolute negation of the loss of the nation. It should be noted that literary history can be interlaced through the process of thick describing the experience of colonization with the victim as the subject.