두 개의 거울: 민족 담론의 자화상 그리기 - 장혁주와 김사량을 중심으로

Abstract

Both resident Koreans in Japan and scholars of Korean literature have considered the notorious pro-Japanese writer Chang Hyk-chu as nothing more than a “cowardly traitor.” Kim Sa-ryang, on the other hand, has been treated as a symbol of the “resistance literature that withstood the dark years of the late colonial period.” Set in binary opposition to each other, these two appraisals offer us a glimpse of the collective unconscious informing the selective process of memory through which Koreans living in a postcolonial society have attempted to construct a self-identity. In the case of each of these writers, Chang Hyk-chu and Kim Sa- ryang, what is being forgotten, and what is being remembered? What is the fundamental principle underlying this mechanism of remembering and forgetting? How is Korean “national identity” formed as a result, or in the process, of this selective remembering? These questions will provide the framework for the examination in this paper of the ways in which nationalist discourse has functioned, and continues to operate, in postcolonial Korean society.