1950년대 세계주의와 현대성 연구 - 강력한 주체성과 봉쇄된 개성 -

Abstract

This paper explores into the relationship between planning of modernity and cosmopolitanism of the Korean literature in the 1950s. Looking at the chapters of a discussion in the 1950s, discussions which seek to get to the bottom of the backwardness of the Korean society overflow. Advancement of the western society is universally perceived and the peculiarity/backwardness of Korea is generally recognized in the framework of the Asia's peculiarity/backwardness. It could be safely said that cosmopolitanism in Korea in the 1950s defines the western value of the liberal democracy camp as a universal value in a cold war system and orients in the cold toward modernization and as a result, plays a central role in the world history. This cosmopolitanism goes through to a modernity issue in a literature chapter. In literature chapters, an issue of identity in order to escape from Asia's backwardness to acquire worldwide universality emerged. A sense of confrontation was accentuated and a behavioral, resistant avant-garde identity was emphasized. Because this type of humans are considered to be proper for conducting an urgent task of realizing worldwide universality. Also, for these subjects, ethics and responsibility as a group subject, rather than an individual's autonomous character, were required as an important virtue. This was also a model which the backward Korean liberal democratic system requested in the 1950s. Planning of modernity in the 1950s was frustrated by a desire of cosmopolitanism. Because the western value was yearned as a name of newness and universality, realization of aesthetic modernity resistant to the social and economical modernity was difficult to expect. That is to say, the inside of those who emphasized aesthetic modernity really were led away by and into the direction of the social and economical modernity. Modernity which could be only achieved via a gap between those two modernities made the distance between the same modernities zero and was frustrated just in presence of a time of the very advancement which they would faster reach. Also, the subjects in the Korean literature in the 1950s, instead of a subject with individuality as an autonomous one, were not free from the morals and responsibility imposed on the backward Korean society, the morals and ethics of the liberal democracy system. This is in opposite to planning of modernity which denies a transcendental subject.