문학주의적 주체론과 역사의 이념— 임화의 신문학사론 재고 —

Abstract

This paper rereads Im Hwa’s history of New Literature, which was mainly developed from 1939 to 1941, in tandem with his journalistic literary criticism during the second half of the 1930s. It argues that Im’s position during the period was modernist, which inevitably led him to grasp the modernist idea of historicity；Im understood this as contingent upon the writing subject’s commitment to contemporariness. Previous studies on Im Hwa’s late 1930s criticism have regarded his theories of subject, realism, and literary history as a continuation of his activism as a leader in the leftist literary movement. However, Im’s literary history can also be read as a performative act intended to theorize the nation of Chosŏn by radicalizing modernist interpretations of the concepts of literature, critique, and historicity. Im committed himself to modernism by sharply distinguishing the era when he was writing his late 1930s criticism from former periods during which New Literature and proletarian literature arose. In The Logic of Literature, a collection of his modernist literary criticism published in 1940, he demonstrated his ability to describe the genesis of subjectivity within his own writing process. The subjectivity here was completely limited to the subjectivity of the critic himself. This literarist description of subjectivity led Im to ground the idea of historicity in the intrinsic immediacy of literature. Thus, Im’s theories of subject and realism can be understood as a monistic understanding of literature / criticism / history. Im’s concepts of “New” and of “Chosŏn,” as devleped in his discussion of modern Korean literary history, were foremed by radicalizing his idea of literature / criticism / history from the modernist perspective. By inventing this idea of Chosŏn, Im’s literary history suggests one possible way to imagine a collective subjectivity of universalism.