동아시아 프로문학 연구의 현재를 묻다－캐런 손버, 사무엘 페리, 아니카 컬버의 연구서를 중심으로－

Abstract

This paper investigates the current wave of vibrant research surrounding East Asian proletarian literature, a dormant topic since the collapse of the cold war system. In the ambit of current American scholarship, research not only aims to investigate post-national and post-imperial aspects of East Asian proletarian literature, but also attempts to reevaluate it in the context of the ‘world’ in the inter-war and war-time period globally. This tendency clearly shows that East Asian Studies as Area Studies has recently reached an inflection point. In this article, I examine these aspects by considering the scholarship of Karen L. Thornber (2009), Samuel Perry (2014) and Annika A. Culver (2014). First, Karen L. Thornber’s study analyzes the widespread trans-cultural situation occurring in East Asian literature from 1895 to 1945, amid a rapid re-adjustment of geopolitics in Asia. This study investigates how Japanese texts-including Western literature translated into Japanese- were accepted in colonial cities and in the metropole; furthermore, it focuses on the intertextuality of the reception process in East Asia. However, Thornber argues the inadequacy offocusing on asymmetrical aspects of the relationship between colonizer and colonized so as to gage the perspective of colonized intellectuals beyond mediatic ‘desire’ and ‘contact’. Rather, research should center on how asymmetrical relationships actually influenced the colinized literary world. Second, Samuel Perry’s study not only focuses on children, fairy tales, “wall fiction” (kabe syousetsu) and the Proletarian avant-garde in Japanese proletarian literature, but also describes the relationship between Korean and Japanese proletarian activists and writers. This study dynamically depicts unfamiliar aspects of Japanese proletarian literature, such as the aesthetic differences between the Soviet Union and Japan. Third, Annika A. Culver’s study examines the role of pro-Marxist Japanese intellectuals in the construction of Manchukuou’s local culture after the collapse of the proletarian movement. In particular, Culver traces Japanese modernist and avant-garde artists’ participation in Manchukou propaganda. In the above analyses I re-illuminate these three books’ investigations of East Asian proletarian literature history from starting point to demise. These studies clearly suggest a specific direction for East Asian proletarian literature research. In the future, studies on East Asian proletarian literature should look beyond the tracing of regional particularities, offering a more comprehensive reinterpretation of texts within our current world context.