임화의 『개설신문학사』와 근대전환기 문화의 ‘메타모포시스’

Abstract

This essays explores Hwa Im(1908-1953)’s writing The History of Korean New Literature from the theoretical perspective of ‘cultural metamorphoses.’ He formulated general characteristics of ever-changing culture as the ensemble of universality, hybridity and singularity. Based on this formulation, he could vindicate ‘national identity claim’ under the colonial circumstances without substantializing a nation nor falling back on ‘authenticity of national culture.’(Ch.2)In chapter 3, I expanded conceptual implications of cultural ‘metamorphoses’, thereby illuminating multiple aspects of Hwa Im’s cultural thoughts. He recognized colonial transformation of culture ('transplantation') but he pursued the way of increasing the puissance of the colonized by the creative articulation of inherited and foreign cultures. The problem of cultural continuities and discontinuities can be more clearly understood by distinguishing cultural elements and a structure as a paradigm of understanding/constituting the world. On the level of cultural elements, there is no discontinuity in that ‘a culture’ is ‘always already’ a mixture of inherited and foreign cultural elements. On the level of cultural structure, however, there was a rupture, discontinuity and a transformation of the paradigm of the world, not just general changes of culture. Hwa Im’s writing the History of Korean New Literature was a praxis of performatively (re-)constituting the cultural identity of Korean nation amid the assimilation policy of the Japanese Empire. It was also a groping for a completely new social imagination as a future to come, by projecting his desires for overcoming modernity/coloniality of his times on to the transitional period into Korean modernity as another ‘metamorphic’ time.