구인회와 문학권력

Abstract

This paper analyzes the self-consciousness about the literary power involved in the problem of writing focused on the articles written by the members of Guinhoe before its association. In the 1930s, a writer of the Joseon literary circle was not only a writer who wrote literary works but also an author who had a kind of literary power. The fact that they were not free from ‘literary power’ or ‘literary journeywork’ can be implied by the words ‘pure literature research’ which they put forward from the beginning of the group. Considering the works written by the members of the association before its founding, we can see that a key source of their solidarity and organization was themselves who were writers but couldn’t be fully recognized as writers. Their writings include loneliness, inferiority, and anxiety as writers. In this sense, we need to focus on the fact that the group recruited reporters from each newspaper as a response or a defense to KAPF and the group members had maintained the quality of the group by gathering writers who were already recognized for their works while they were writing for their lives. The ‘pure literature’ emphasized by the group was a literature free from political purpose and different with a writing as a means of living. The members of the association expressed their literary will in a way of responding to the accusations of professional writers. This revealed each member of the group as a writer and had changed the situation of literary circles declined to politics. Also, the group members had noticed the tendency of Joseon literary circle moving toward journalism and showed their literary activities under the framework making connections among author, editor and reader. In this point of view, some aspects of the group, like a literary event planned by them, the exposure about the journalism encouraging plagiarism, serial review criticizing literary senior’s defection and a strategy of writing essay expressing embarrassment of journeywork, can be understood. The members had showed that the power of literature should come not from the political ideology, from the factionalism of the media, from the authority of the editor, but from the ‘quality of works’ and ‘a passion of a writer’ while accepting the existence of a rank of power in the literary circle in the 1930s. For them, the association was designed to overcome the self-divide of the subjective of writing and the shame of the literary journeywork they had to experience in the process of confronting the capitalization of literature.