문학주의와 아포리아 ―조연정의 『장전된 시간：한국문학과 정치』(소명출판, 2024)―

Abstract

This article is a book review of Yeonjeong Cho’s Loaded Time-Korean Literature and Politics. ‘Time’ is a concept emphasized here to reconsider historical periods as long-term flow of literary chapters, rather than from the perspective of a chronicle that enumerates significant events in chronological order. In this respect, the author organizes the contents in the order of 1990s, 1970s, 1960s, and colonial literature to cover the literary chapters in depth, but also to discuss different attitudes and perspectives in the literary space that leads to The first part. The third part deals with the struggle of poets to realize the maximum of ‘freedom’ in language and image at the level of creation and discourse. The fact that the second part of the book focuses on the discourse and perception of literary issues in criticism is due to the special circumstances of the 1970s, a boom period of criticism that is unprecedented in the history of Korean literature. According to Cho, the background for the surge in criticism was a shared understanding of the relationship between literature and reality, or in other words, the unique role of literature as a mediator between autonomy and otherness. In other words, there was a shared concern for ‘reality’ that was difficult to ignore in order to emphasize the autonomy of literature, and the need to interpret the relationship between literature and society in a logical and theoretical way. In other words, the point at which it became difficult to evaluate literary texts entirely without interpreting reality means that the lack of expression characteristic of the literary scene in the 1970s made it inevitable for writers to work symbolically, and that the era of literary criticism, which doubles as or replaces the theory of time, has arrived. Unlike conventional literary historical evaluations, Baek Nakcheong is evaluated as a ‘fundamental literary critic’ and Kim Hyun as a ‘literary critic with reality in mind’ based on literary publicity. Therefore, this book examines the ways in which these two extremes produce discourses of Korean literature and politics, and closely follows the theoretical and critical logic that embodies the era of ‘literalism’ to reveal the research achievements of this book.