동아시아의 혁명적 공간인식과 소수집단문학의 가능성 연구: 『해란강아 말하라』와 『격정시대』

Abstract

This paper examines how national spaces of the East Asia are imagined and implemented in literature with properties of a minority group in the two novels by Hak-Cheol Kim, Tell Me, the Heran River and The Passion Age. The situations that writer Kim had experienced in the three countries of Korea, China and Japan are, whether they were personal or political problems, are reproduced in his novels as characters who cause an ignition of social revolutions to the minority group. Even though the ‘minority group’ is itself not the only factor to determine properties of some literature, the two novels show that national minority groups are driven into revolutionary social changes from colonial literature as well as from the imperialistic order of domination, in the East Asia, through such characters who live as fighters against the Empire of Japan and those who struggle as revolutionaries for the abolition of class distinctions. Tell Me, the Heran River depicts the courses that people of a minority group adapt to their severe reality from a historical view of socialism or revolutionary realism. Its main background is such events as ‘the Massacre at Heran River,’ with which it is describing lives of peasants who protest and fight against exploitation of Japanese imperialism and feudal landlords. The Passion Age too is a realistic record about political persecution experienced by the minority group who participated in armed struggles against Japanese rulers as Korean volunteer corps. Both of the two novels show that it is possible for the minority groups to create their own literature in which revolutionary characters implement the double assignments to get out of imperialist oppression and to maintain national identity as a minority group in the East Asia during the colonial period.