소설, 서사시, 국민문학 -식민지 시기 최재서의 문학 정치학-

Abstract

This article intends to look into literary thoughts of Choi, Jae Seo in the colonial era focused on arguments on narrative literature. For Choi, Jae Seo, novel is a form composed of two poles, realism and moral. However, as the present is prescribed as absence of moral, contemporary novel is judged as a form unsatisfying fundamental requirements of novel. Such an absence of moral is expressed as a lack of characters in novels. And from the aspect that character can exist with combination of realism and moral, the lack of characters becomes an indication that displays fundamental enervation of contemporary novels. Facing the fundamental enervation, Choi, Jae Seo requested to return to the ancient epic. Since epic as the archetype of narrative literature is a form showing a unified world by idea, it was considered to configure characters impossible in contemporary novel. Through the understanding on epic, Choi, Jae Seo could insist national literature. It was because national literature was a literary movement to realize the epic world unified through Japanese view of the world. These epic and national literature were very problematic in that they relegated the reality of the colonized Chosun by suggesting a kind of ideal picture of the world, and blocked a possibility of change in the future at the outset by asserting a completion of a history. It’s because here, only infinitive repetition of the present exists.