식민지 모더니즘을 역사화하라! - 최현희,『도둑맞은 이름들—한국 근대문학과 식민지 모더니즘』, 소명출판, 2022

Abstract

This article is a book review of The Purloined Names : Modern Korean Literature and Colonial Modernism(2022) a study book on colonial modernism. This book unfolds the plane of immanence in which everything converging into colonial modernism, including writers and works, readers, media, history, and reality, is rolled out. The author’s performative reading of colonial modernism is to present and historicize colonial modernism. In other words, the purpose of this book is to present a new methodology for reading Korean colonial modernism while at the same time presenting colonial modernism. The title of this book is The Purloined Names. As the name is taken away, colonists is foreclosed from the real world. But the body of the colony embodies the illogicality of imperialism. By creating bumps on a smooth plane, this trace prevents the world from becoming totalized and creates endless noise. The author of the book calls this noise ‘literature’. The way to present colonization is not to reclaim what has been taken as it is, but to become a complete other. The never-ending practice of the chatty noise created by this other’s community is the real face of colonial modernism as the purloined names.