'독본(讀本)'을 통해 본 근대적 텍스트의 형성과 변화

Abstract

A ‘reader’ was a kind of modern text that took the form of a textbook. As the modern school system was introduced and the subjects went through reorganization, it was inevitable to adopt official books for teaching and learning, that is, textbooks. Those textbooks that appeared during the early modern times are useful in investigating the reorganization of modern discourses and tracing back the process of the full-scale formation, specialization, and distribution of literature in a modern sense. Understanding that a simultaneous analysis of texts and literature systems is the precondition of the overall apprehension of modern literature, readers are worth reviewing since they were an institutional medium used to establish the standard knowledge system and secure the reproduction structure exclusively. It is worth noticing that ‘the modern mind’ was conflicting between the institutions and non-institutions, the government and private sector, and the Japanese and the Koreans in the process of the medium’s formation. Thus it seems like that, by having concern in and doing an ultimate analysis of a reader, we can understand the formation process of Chosun’s modern discourses and process of ‘canonization of literature’ and further interpret the causes of postcolony in a symptomatic way. Based on those discussions, this study set out to investigate the institutional language and literature education using readers and their characteristics and examine how a reader came into existence as a textbook outside the territory of a textbook, what was the meaning of its formation as a trend during a certain period, and how and until when it was maintained with its own reproduction structure. As it was entering the modern age, it was a ‘reader’ that embraced into the institutions the school system and literary system, which were still in the medieval environment. But it failed to reorganize them into a totally new system. The status of a reader is different from that of newspaper or magazine even though it shares the common service of spreading the modern mind in a broader sense and planning, imagining, and designing a new era of modern times with the two media. A reader was the medium and institution to present of ‘modern distance’ of its own kind and lead the trend in a critical manner. Boys and Youth, for example, introduced the world’s knowledge and criticized the world literature within the frame, while The Current litrtature Reader rarely printed western literary works and was active in introducing classical works of Korea, attempting to make a canonic model of the Korean modern literature. In this sense, it would not be too absurd to conclude that a reader was ‘a road map as a confirmed institution with a standard system’ placed on the way to ‘Korean linguistics and literature of imagination.’ In the initial stage, the textbooks within the category of educational policies and systems and the non-textbooks along with the aggressive willingness to pursue education of Korean started at the same point. But as time went by, the gap between the two sector grew bigger. In the 1930s, the rates of Koreans getting education exploded, which ignited the ferocious battle between media in the institutional and non-institutional way. The basic trend of all that was a ‘reader’ enlightening the public, classifying the reader groups whose focus was the distribution of the modern mind, and developing their perception of literature in a elaborate way, thus making its way to a ‘lecture.’