보편을 분유（分有）하는 문학소녀들의 책읽기 —전혜린의 독서 노트와 베스트셀러 『데미안』의 탄생

Abstract

This essay investigates the phenomenon of Herman Hesse’s novel Demian being reborn as a bestseller owing to Jeon Hyerin’s essay on the novel. It also complicates the position of female readers of this novel as a bildungsroman to examine the importance of its cultural history. In the early 1960s Korea, Hesse was recognized as a literary giant and a spiritual leader of post-war Germany. However, it was Jeon Hyerin’s essay which prompted Hesse’s novel Demian to become a bestseller, and for the German writer to be known as a writer of the most beloved coming-of-age novel. In her essay, Jeon Hyerin described Demian as a youth obsessed with pursuing existentialist questions and exploring the ‘idea’ of a human. She also wrote about a classmate of hers from girls’ school who had died after reading the novel under discussion. This, perhaps, could also hint at the reason why women who read her essay took an interest in Demian. The readers were captivated by the universal symbols of the modern age embodied in the novel as argued by Jeon Hyerin. I intend to argue that Jeon Hyerin’s essay suggests that she experienced alienation as a Korean woman, which encouraged her interest in universality despite the fact that the same universality would be denied to her for that very reason. It was also this very ‘universality’ that rendered Jeon Hyerin susceptible to criticism. Her emphasis on universality was seen as abstract and thus, lacking a historical consciousness. As a Korean, and as a woman, Jeon Hyerin experienced double othering which also ignited the need in her for a universal language. Her aspirations for universality revealed the internalized cracks which exist between the dichotomy of the West and Korea. Reading and translating German literature was a process for her to reclaim her position as a Subject within this framework. Jeon Hyerin is remembered as a cultural symbol because she was not the only one who desired to share universality through literature in that time. It was also the female readers of the time who also displayed the same desire.