『大韓自强會月報』의 운동성과 지향 연구 - 자강회 내부의 이질적 그룹과 그 성격을 중심으로-

Abstract

In the Modern Enlightenment period, most of monthly reports were published by academic societies—identified as an edification movement group. Among them, this study is not only about the writers who contributed to the Daehan Self-reliant Association (DSA)’s Monthly issues—the most representative modern enlightenment magazine, but also probes into the existence of subgroups within the Association and their different characteristics. The first subgroup, including DaeWonJangBu and Yun Hyo-Jeong, strongly poses the pro-Japanese attitude. As an advisor of the DSA, DaeWonJangBu imbued a sense of defeatism into Koreans and so he justified the Japanese authorities’ control over the Korean peninsula. Also, he made Korean intellectuals blind to the nature of Japanese imperialism and led to glorify and admire Japan as a successful model of modernization. Jang Ji-Yeon, forming the second subgroup of the association, put an emphasis on self-reliance for a great cause; in fact, however, he neglected the colonized reality of his own country. His ambivalent attitude might be attributed partly to the contemporary popular discourse centered on Japan covering the invasive nature of imperialism. The third one was made up of Lee Gi and Park Eun-shik, who joined temporarily—Park left the group after the 6th issue and so did Lee after the 9thone. It is the reason that, at first, they were motivated by their common cause of self-reliance and independence from Japan but they seemed to realize its pro-Japanese tendency later on. The last group whose members are Kim Sung-Hee, Yu Gun and Sul Tae-Hee played a functional role in introducing foreign academic theories into Korea ; they seemed to have the strong intellectual respect for Japanese civilization. Such divisions among DSA writers can be summarized as factions by the heterogeneous members that splintered from one another and pro-Japanese characteristics enhanced. After then, Lee Gi and Park Eun-shik put every effort to find alternatives through from Honam Academic Association to North-West Academic Association. On the other hand, DaeWonJangBu, Yun Hyo-Jeoung, Kim Sung-hee, Sul Tae-he, and others took a stronger pro-Japanese stance through the Daehan Academic Association, a follow-up version of the DSA. To sum up, the DSA is thought to be a group dense with the mixture of the era’s contradiction and class struggle, as well as an interest group pursuing modernism.