잡지 『신천지』를 통해서 본 ‘전후인식’ 양상

Abstract

This thesis is a study on the singularities of the post-war perception in the Korean history of literature based on the magazine ‘Shincheonji’, which was published throughout the Korean War up to 1954 since its first publication in January 1946. The thesis attempts to disclose how the meanings of both concepts of ‘war’ and ‘post-war’ are structuralized in the literary world within the Korean society, which suffered the World War II and the Korean War. After the liberation, the experience of Korean society regarding the World War and the Korean War, as seen in the literary medium, was utilized to justify the discourse of the groups that wished to lead the social atmosphere of that time. Although both post-liberation and post-war national reconstructions seem similar to each other, they are both different in terms of their goals. The perception of post-war Korea after the ‘World War’ is not that of a combatant nation but that of a beneficiary of the war. This was not an attempt to ‘conceal’ or ‘avoid’ the war but rather to take on an active intent. Meanwhile, the perception of being a victim of the Third World War was shaped in the ‘post-war’ Korea after the ‘Korean War’. The Korean War was ‘World War III’, the product of the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union, and a war which broke out from the failure of building an independent nation, which was so longed for. It is in such contrasting perceptions that the Korean society processed its war trauma. The ‘post-World War II’ Korean society handled the war trauma by putting its goal of building an independent nation on the forefront, while the ‘post-Korean War’ Korean society dealt with the war trauma by focusing its efforts on establishing a strong anti-communist ideology to repel the communist camp which caused the outbreak of the war. However, it is worth to take notice that this was materialized as a methodology to structuralize a sound discourse for the leading forces of the society. In this process, the healing of the Korean people’s war trauma was left completely disregarded. Shincheonji took the lead in this phenomenon, as seen in its discourse of the ‘world literature’ and ‘pure literature’. Eventually, the two wars propelled ideological uniformity and the fixation of the nation’s division issue, as the two wars, which the modern Korean society experienced, were perceived differently from each other.