한국전쟁기 전시독본의 형성 기반과 논리

Abstract

The Korean War was an ideological warfare. On a war footing, existing literary systems or means of education had to be reorganized to conform to the ideological battle. One of the most remarkable changes was that the media including newspapers, magazines and books which sustained the established system of the time played a very active role in national planning. During the Korean War Period, a variety of readers were produced to meet the different needs of the public, either intellectual or popular tastes. In the fields of literature and education, the media became readers for themselves as it was changing in line with the war footing. These readers were used as a supplementary textbook for a specific subject at schools, as well as a means of instilling specific ideology and knowledge more conveniently into soldiers or the wider public without school education. The purpose of this paper was to take a closer look at the foundation, reality and characteristics of wartime readers published during the Korean War, which has been pushed aside thus far in the researches on the Korean War Period literature. Among the readers, this paper focused particularly on wartime readers, which were utilized as auxiliary textbooks at education facilities for refugees to implant specific ideologies and to raise people's awareness of the current situation at the time. These wartime readers were comprised of nine different types of 『Wartime Life』 targeting elementary school students and three types of 『Wartime Reader』 designed for middle school students and adults. Based on the dichotomy between ally and enemy, these readers were strategically published to bring the anti-communism with the cold war mindset into the fore and to internalize the excessive yearning for free democracy represented by the United States. Wartime readers, which are rightly described as strategic texts with a strong political and enlightening nature, can be divided into troop information and education (TI&E) readers and cultural readers. TI&E readers aimed at encouraging the public's political education to indoctrinate the national ideology, while cultural readers literally meant to enhance the level of people's culture and knowledge. 『Wartime Life』 and 『Wartime Reader』, collectively referred to as wartime readers, were distributed free of charge to students at war refuge shelters as an important TI&E readers for instilling national ideology, and they were one of the most important state-run media to unite the public in the rear. These efforts were made to confirm the superiority of free democracy, reaffirm the need to understand and collaborate with the United Nations and to emphasize the importance of practicing the wartime lifestyle with unwavering commitment to anti-communism, thereby firmly establishing a national identity. The message that these wartime readers intended to deliver was mostly related to the war footing and the most pressing issue of the time was used as a main theme. This is especially true for ‘Enlightenment Guidance,’ in which defeatism or war-weariness were described as the sets of mind that should be firmly excluded in ideological warfare, while implanting the positive conviction that Free World and the Republic of Korea would eventually prevail. In addition, industrial reconstruction, relief activities for war refugees and restoration, governmental financial management, public order and security, tax collection and many other pending issues of the time were aggressively reflected. As the target readers for 『Wartime Life』 and 『Wartime Reader』 were different, they adopted different rhetorical devices for maximum effectiveness. While 『Wartime Life』 tried to provide a guidance for wartime lifestyle in a natural way through a narrative of real story that children from war refugee shelters experienced at school or at home, 『Wartime Reader』 was strongly driven to convey the national ideology through explanation. Lastly, these wartime readers continued to be reproduced in the form of 『Common Chinese Reader』, 『Patriotic Reader』, 『Anti-communism Reader』, 『Anti-communism Textbook』, 『Patriotic Life』, 『Moral Life』, performing an ideological role of consolidating efforts to establish and maintain a nation-state.