민중적 민족문학론의 전개와 문화예술 주체의 문제 : 『문학예술운동』과 『사상문예운동』을 중심으로

Abstract

This article aimed to discuss practical radical progressiveness of the theory of people’s national literature focusing on Art Literature Movement and Ideological Literature Movement Previously, the theory of people’s national literature was interpreted mainly based on the idea of making the working class and general public creators of literature in order to overcome the limitations of petit bourgeois national literature. However, it has largely neglected the questions of how such criticism has specifically progressed and what experiments and explorations were performed in the process. The theory of people’s national literature attempts step-by-step group creation among the working class or joint creation between intellectuals and writers and the field professionals and activists in order to apply criticism of petit bourgeois. However, in the process, the discrepancy between theory and practice becomes evident. In order to overcome the discrepancy, the theory of people’s national literature takes two practical actions:first, it not only produces text from the viewpoint of Rezeptionsasthetik but it also attempts to analyze its distribution and reception. As a result, it discovers that the identity of the working class, which is believed as being identical, is, in fact, diverged into disparate identities that conflict and, based on this analysis, creates a new concept of text that is constantly restructured through the process of production-distribution-reception, instead of the concept of single finished text. Second, it attempts to analyze mass culture that dominates the day-to-day life of the working class. By doing so, it deconstructs the opposing structure between the mass culture and people’s culture and identifies the question of ‘position warfare’ in an attempt to establish a progressive culture through appropriation of mass culture. The theory of people’s national literature has significance in today’s society not simply because it attempted to expand the class of writers from intellectuals and writers to workers and people in general. Rather, the theory successfully evolved its progressiveness through specific practices in reality and explored a specific ‘image’ of alternative resistance culture through recognition of the working class by combination of multiple contradiction. These accomplishments are meaningful in the context of literature history in that they realized the progressiveness of literature in the 1980’s on a practical level rather than on a textual level.