구로노동자문학회의 형성과 전개

Abstract

This article aims to empirically examine the formation and development process of the ‘Guro Workers’ Literature Society’, a typical example of workers’ writing in the 1980s and 1990s. To this end, interview data from major members such as Yoo Siju, Jo Gijo, Song Kyungdong, Kim Sai, and Lee Young-shin, as well as basic data such as anthologies, newsletters and various data collections, were used. ‘The Guro Workers’ Literature Society’ began at the ‘Workers’ Culture School’, which opened in 1988, was reorganized in 1989, and was renamed the current name, and was active for 18 years until it was disbanded in February 2006. In the process of forming the ‘Guro Workers’ Literature Society’ in the early days, the awareness of the problem of labor literature, which spread in the wake of the ‘Workers’ Great Struggle in 1987’, worked against the background. In particular, so-called “Hakchool” such as Yoo Sijoo and Kim Yoontae played an important role in mediating “literature” and “labor” in this process. Since then, from the late 80s to the early 90s, the existing concept of elitist literature has been criticized, and various aesthetic searches are prominent to position the working class as a new subject of literature. Since the mid-to-late 1990s, the ‘Guro Workers’ Literature Society’ has also experienced difficulties amid the overall decline of the labor movement. During this period, the ‘Guro Workers’ Literature Society’ criticizes the mainstream literary trend in the 1990s, which has been regarded as disconnected from literature in the 80s, and considers alternative literary production~distribution mechanisms. Since then, the members, including Jo Gijo, Hwang Gyugwan, Song Kyungdong, and Kim Sai, work as individual authors and continue to seek self-renewal of labor literature. The ‘Guro Workers’ Literature Society’ can be evaluated as having a high literary history status in that it is a specific example of overcoming the custom of thinking separately between labor and literature and the concept of literature monopolized by a specific class.