동양적인 것, 조선적인 것, 그리고 『문장』

Abstract

This paper aims to consider the contexts in which the Eastern, as hegemonic discourse for the critique of ‘the Modern=the West’, has been understood and reproduced in literary field of colonial Choseon朝鮮. By examining Munjang文章 which is apt to be appreciated its traditional inclination, I inquired into the dynamics between the Eastern and the Choseon in their positive founding respectively. Munjang appeared in the wake of the Choseonism朝鮮主義 movement, but it shows a certain obscure configuration which consisted of the thought of total war, anti-modern traditionalism, and heritage of modernism. It used to be explained that Munjang had a strong tendency of ant-modern traditionalsim, but such a tendency was formed in the intersection of forces which had quite different directions of the thought of total war and heritage of modernism. In Munjang, there were not only voices which criticized the dichotomy of ‘the West/the East’ assumed in the hegemonic discourses, but also perspectives which looked the remnantness of ‘the Choseon’ as the non-reductiveness. Especially, Dong-ri Kim金東里 tried actualizing the ‘native property’ in abolishing the substantialist distinction between the Choseon and the Eastern, and in creating the works which explore the ‘the ultimate sense of the life’ mediated by folklore, art, legend etc.. He reveals the specificity of Munjang that is distinguished not only from ‘the Eastern’ as the thought of total war, but also from the essentialist conceptualization of ‘the Choseon’. But these attempts, which tried to combine ‘the defeated’ with the principle of creation, had a tendency to eliminate the ‘memory of defeat’ in the form of ‘vengeance’, not to speak of the hegemonic discourse of ‘the Eastern’.