방법으로서의 세계문학 -1970년대 외국문학/민족문학 담론과 (탈)후진성 인식을 중심으로-

Abstract

This article recounts the literary discussion on the backwardness of Korea after hearing the news that Korea's international status has been upgraded from developing countries to developed countries in 2021. The determination of the status of developed countries in Korea is the result of the categories and standards of UNTAD (UNTAD) member states, and since then, the concept of "third world" has been commercialized and the psychological geography of developed countries has been solidified. In order to examine the boom phenomenon of the third world theory, the topography and characteristics of national literature and foreign literature discourse have been examined so far. This overlaps with the process of preparing discourses and media by the first generation of Korean literature and foreign literature after liberation as foreign literature majors began to criticize Korean literature in earnest since the 1960s. In particular, the composition and perspective of national literature-world literature, which have been continuously discussed in the academic journal, cannot be irrelevant to the prosperity of the branch of comparative literature. In the 1970s, after liberation, first-generation Korean writers such as Kim Dong-wook created an opportunity to systematize the theory and methodology of foreign literature research through the Korean Comparative Literature Society (1959). The institutional search and practice of renewing the status of Korean literature in the unit of comparative literature was due to the judgment that the complex of acceptance of foreign literature has been overcome to some extent. In the history of Korean intelligence, the sad imagination and discourse of world literature and Korean literature were possible by a third world perspective. From the center of Western literature, the possibility of world literature can only be discussed in the vertical relationship between propagation and acceptance, but from a third world perspective, Korean literature and world literature have a horizontal relationship. For this reason, Baek Nak-cheong explained that literature in developed countries is part of potential third-world literature, and then stressed that what is popular is the universality of world literature. However, for Kim Woo-chang, the inherent universality assumed in the third world theory is only an aesthetic imagination. The universality of literature is understood as a totality that is not fixed than the relationship and structure of national literature-world literature itself. The literature theory of those who aimed for world literature and its issues persisted as a possibility and method of universalizing the backwardness of Korean literature. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the efforts to converge into totality and institutional and discourse practices that resist structural contradictions were operated from the perspective of backwardness.