The Body Luminous: The Changing Status of Literature in Korea—and the Modern World

Abstract

With the growing disenchantment that, as Max Weber thought, characterizes the capitalist development, the general is bound to lose the luminous and numinous aura of a transcendant totality, and becomes reduced simply to a logical category enclosing particulars, but the fact is that poetry cannot have its full appeal without this aura, which evokes,beyond a particular, the presence of a larger reality as a more than conceptual generality. In short, poetry seems by itself to have a way of evoking a mystic aura beyond the relation of subsumption between the general and the particular. In this context, I try to provide the trajectory of Korean poetry which parallels a similar curve of development in the West, by extracting a simplified version of the trajectory from Robert Hass’s attempt to place Rainer Maria Rilke in the overall map of modern European and Western poetry from the French Revolution on, symbolism, modernism, and the quatidian realism of today. This could be a measure for the modern development of poetry, East and West, and for our age in which poetry is losing its status as a serious project of humanity in its struggle to position itself credibly in the world.