근대문학의 조건, 네이션≠국가의 경험

Abstract

Modern literature is more often than not defined in terms of national literature. It means that the formation of modern literature has been established based on nation state. This formulation has become a common sense in literary history. Modern Korean literature, however, cannot be aligned to this formulation, because it has been formed through unusual experiences of nation≠state (the conceptual break-up of nation and state). This formulation also ignores the fact that the historical formation of modern literature overlaps with the colonizing process of the Third World by imperial powers. That is to say, modern literature emerges where different kinds of experiences of the colonizer and the colonized intersect with each other. Therefore, the experience of nation≠state cannot be limited to literature of the colonized. Rather, it should be regarded as global phenomena. The experience of nation≠state gives a rise to modern literature. This is true not only in literature of the colonized but also that of the colonizer. The national literature of colonial Chosun always presupposes the experience of nation≠state. To put it in other words, Korean national literature or ․ has been founded upon the impossibility of the formation of the nation-state. Throughout the course of the formation of national literature, the concept of nation has undergone critical changes, according to which we can thus periodize modern literature into several phases. In the late period of Chosun Dynasty, the term 'nation' was imported and translated into two different words: at first, kukmin (citizens of the state), and later minjok (people). The term kukmin signifies that the notion of state had just begun to emerge, while minjok reflects the fact that nation began to be conceptually distinguished from the state. In that period, the notion of state had developed in conjunction with the discourses of 'civilization/state.' In contrast, the meaning of nation had been disseminated through awakening to nation/culture. State was coupled with civilization; nation with culture. Later, the conceptual opposition between culture and civilization evolved into that of the spiritual and the material. It was immediately after Russo-Japanese Wars that nation's superiority over state began to be generally accepted, along with the superiority of the spiritual over the material. The discontinuity and imbalance between nation and state was widely agreed. It was based on this discontinuity that early modern literature of Korea had formed. Later, as the unity of speech and writing was pursued, national literature or minjokmunhak took the central role in building national culture. Around the 1930s, however, modern Korean literature had to undergo another fundamental change. Through the Manchurian Incident and the Second Sino-Japanese War, Japan's statism was reinforced and kukminmunhak (signaling the superiority of state over nation) was forcefully imposed on colonial Korea. It was in this period that binary oppositions between standard and non-standard languages, between imperial center and colonial periphery began to be established. In this situation, Korean national culture and language was classified as a mere dialect and parochialism which should be regulated by Japanese normative culture and language. This brought about a paradoxical situation in which the more Korean parochial culture prospers the stronger the hierarchy between center and periphery becomes. It was in this context that the unity of speech and writing was consciously rejected while regional dialects became dominant in poetry.