동아시아 속의 향토문학

Abstract

The first Taiwan literary work introduced in Korea is Sayonara, Zaijian, Huang Chun-ming's collection of short stories, which was published as one of the “third-world literature” series of Changbi publisher in 1983. A story “Two Painters” in the collection was adapted into a play named “Chilsu and Mansu” in 1986 with both critical and popular success, and was made into a movie of the same title by Park Kuang-su, a forerunner of the Korean New Wave Film movement in 1980s. The fact that Huang Chun-ming's story was welcomed by Korean audience is attributed to the similar historical paths and social structure since modern times. Also, a vigorous atmosphere of the third-world alliance movement across the East Asian cultural arena around the 1970s was one of the factors that conveyed Nativist literature into Korean cultural sphere. Like Chinese and Japanese scholars, Korean intellectuals began to focus on the Taiwan literature through the Nativist Literature debates of 1977-1978. However, there was a special element peculiar to Korean circumstance. It was the National Literature debates which have heated up the Korean literary world since the late 1960s. The obvious resemblance between the National Literature discourse and the Nativist literature discourse was that both insisted on the literature's societal engagement and criticized modernism literature for its blind following Western literature. The specific themes of the literary works which support these two discourses consist of overcoming the Japanese colonial legacy and the class contradiction arisen by rapid economic growth, the direction of third-world national liberation movement, and the national division problem etc. In addition, the path where the Nativist Literature came out of the soil of modernism and soon after opposed to it is comparable to that of the National Literature in Korea, which was born out of the “Pure-Engaging Literature debates” in the early 1960s and had been through long contention with modernism. Since 1990s, with the advent of postmodernism, Nativist Literature and National Literature have faded away. However, a comparative research on these two literary phenomena that once built a united front in each locus in the name of “Nation” and “Native” during the 1970s, and diverged in the middle of the socio-cultural upheaval of 1980s, and finally waned under the dominance of the postmodernism is still worthwhile because it would make it possible to view some local cultural issues within the broad framework of East Asia.