해석자의 과거, 편집자의 역사－최남선의 <소년>과 매체의 물질성－

Abstract

This paper attempts a textual analysis of the magazine Sonyŏn [Boy, or outh], published under the editorship of Ch’oe Namsŏn. The periodical’s editor was the representative figure of Korea’s early modern enlightenment movement, whose engagement in various cultural projects is considered crucial in modern turn of Korean history. I particularly focus on how Sonyŏn presents itself in modern world, which I consider enabled by the materiality of Sonyŏn as media. This analysis is designed to restore the magazine’s textuality, which has been ignored since the turn from Literature to Discourse in Korean literature studies around mid-2000s. In such literary studies evolving around the concept of media, reader, and institution, the focus was on the infinite complexity of discourse around literature. This ultimately results in a groundless assumption of the infinity of the modern, which paradoxically is left alone with “Modern” as an empty name. Any interpretation in this framework reduces “Modern” to a temporality of the absolute past, which necessarily detaches any present interpreters from the given texts’ past. However, in a close textual analysis, it appears impossible to place Sonyŏn in the past; the magazine is locating itself in the present by constantly remaining lacking any sort of meaning. In other words, Sonyŏn introduces irreducible materiality to its world by randomly collecting plural texts, editing them in an orderless way, and publishing them under its name of “Sonyŏn.” At this point, Sonyŏn becomes itself and annihilates everything other than itself. What I call the materiality of Sonyŏn as media is this Sonyŏn, which does not have any meaning or origin. The subjectivity engaging in this self-presentation is called editor. If one calls Sonyŏn the first truly modern magazine in Korean history, one does not mean that Sonyŏn re-present Modern but mean that Sonyŏn presents itself in the ever present world, lacking any sort of transcendence. This interpretation revealing how Sonyŏn insists to locate itself in the eternal present is an act of repetition of editor’s subjectivity of Sonyŏn.