최재서의 ‘질서적 문학관’과 『셰익스피어 예술론』

Abstract

Jaisou Choe (1908-1964) was an important figure in the Korean literary field of the early 20th century, working as a prolific literary critic as well as an outstanding English literature scholar. It is undeniable that his Shakespeare’s Art as Order of Life (1965) is one of the most remarkable Shakespearean studies ever produced by Korean scholars, partly in that it is the first (and only) attempt to analyse the whole dramas of Shakespeare under the single theme of ‘order’ by a Korean Shakespeare scholar. Surprisingly, however, very few proper critical studies on the book have been produced, especially by English literature scholars and this critical neglect is not unrelated to Choe’s notoriously active collaboration with the Japanese regime in the late colonial period. This defect in his career has caused almost all the studies to be delimited in range to his pre-1940s works and in turn his achievement as an English scholar after the 1945 liberation has not received serious critical attention, mainly interpreted as the withdrawal into the academic world after the liberation. Recently some scholars in the Korean studies attempted to identify the continuity and discontinuity in Choe’s literary ideas before and after the liberation, thereby showing how Choe successfully transformed into the apostle of democracy and formed the basis for academism in the Korean literary field of post-liberation. Based on the findings of these recent researches in the Korean studies, this paper aims to read Jaisou Choe’s Shakespeare’s Art as Order of Life in the Korean literary field of post-liberation period. The main question would be how he appropriates Shakespeare as cultural capital to justify his idea of order and what is Shakespeare to him. This reading of Shakespeare’s Art as Order of Life will provide an opportunity to tackle with the controversial issue of the continuity and discontinuity in Choe’s career.