모던 경성(京城)과 감각의 공간

Abstract

Kyungsung(京城), the modern colonial city, gets a new corporality of text in recent trend of cultural history. Colonial cultural studies concentrated in Kyungsung in a way that has been consuming the imagined past. Urbanization of Kyungsung commenced with bursting of the castle walls of Hansung(漢城), the capital of Chosun dynasty in the Middle Ages. It was part of modernization. On the other hand it was part of the imperialist colonial rule. In this paper I inquired into the space of Kyungsung and the structure of the urban sensibility. I intended to peep over big city, streets and spaces of the individual in the Japanese colonial period. In 1910s the city was observed by the outside spectators as a novelty and modern spectacular. The railroad, streetcar and electricity wires were the symbols of modern infrastructure. Kyungsung was a new and brilliant space where the light of civilization began to be infiltrated. This city became the space of neurotic fear for morbid colonial intellectual since the late 1920s. At these period modern urbanization went on to some extend. The individual became an anonymous being in the homogenized modern time and space. Anxiety and lethargy were reactions to the uniformity of the masses. In the second half of 1930s fashion and consumption became methods of life. After the Sino-Japanese War, an apartment house and salon were metonymy of reduced city for the individual, especially for urban professionals and bourgeois. Historical pressure and anxiety of the war drove the individual into the self-sufficient enclosed spaces at the late colonial period.