한국 냉전문화 연구의 인프라스트럭처: 이봉범 저 『전향, 순수, 전후, 참여』(성균관대학교출판부, 2023)와 『한국의 냉전문화사』(소명출판, 2023)에 부치는 서평

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to examine the significance of Lee Bong-Boem’s recent books, Conversion, Pureness, Postwar, Engagement(Sungkyunkwan University Press, 2023) and Cultural Cold War in Korea(Sommyeong, 2023). The two books contain numerous papers that the author has submitted and have been widely cited on a variety of topics over a period of nearly 20 years. The former contains the achievements of cultural studies since 2000, ranging from the history of the media, the conversion sysytem, the debut system, the formation of literary field, and the history of customs. The latter includes recent research that expands the view to dimensions of the global cultural Cold War, including U.S. private foundation aid, the reception and circulation of Cold War texts, the formation of Cold War knowledge, and psychological warfare. All of these discussions are fundamental to the study of the institutional and material foundations of Korean culture and literature in the early Cold War era. In this paper, I focus on a few issues in particular, such as conversion, the reception and circulation of Cold War texts, propaganda and psychological warfare, and the social engagement of intellectuals, to summarize the relevant findings and clarify the challenges ahead. Regarding the conversion after the establishment of the ROK government, the author offers an institutional approach and a view of the dynamic reorganization of the cultural field, but I propose to go further and see the conversion as an event in the history of thought involving an epistemological shift. Meanwhile, a review of the reception and circulation of Cold War texts, in particular the chapters dealing with The God that Failed(1949), has been undertaken to consider the challenges ahead for the ‘1930s in the postwar period’. Finally, while the author’s work on psychological warfare provides a dense reconstruction of the formation and changes in South Korea’s psychological warfare strategy and apparatus, I point out that more work needs to be done on the processes and principles of internalization of Cold War epistemology. The author’s sense of realism, which runs through both books, is always a valuable reference point for literary researchers exploring the world of the represented and the written.