북조선 정전집, ‘현대조선문학선집’ 연구 서설: 1980년대 중반 이후『현대조선문학선집(1∼53)』 (1987∼2011)을 중심으로

Abstract

We may also imagine that North Josun is ‘the most isolated and mysterious state’ or ‘an irrational state’. But it is neither an irrational state nor puzzling existence, which is also applied to its past. Unlike our imagination, at the present point of time, we need to study North Josun literature not with the ‘image’ distributed by the media and made from common sense but with objective ‘object’. 『An Anthology of Modern Josun Literature(1-53)』was reconstructed mainly by Giyoung Lee, an author of ‘proletarian literature’, and others, but it also restored many authors who had been classified as authors of ‘bourgeois literature’ like Gwangsoo Lee and others. When this anthology was re-created and monopolized, poems, fictions, dramas, essays, criticisms and so on were not only rearranged from ‘literature of enlightenment’ to ‘literature in the early 1940’s’ but also the ‘revolutionary songs’ called the ‘creations’ by Ilsung Gim’ and others were included. The anthology tried to reconstruct or re-create a topographical map of Josun literature in the magnetic field of ‘subjective literature theory’, which tried to put together not only ‘anti-Japanese revolutionary literature’ but also ‘bourgeois literature’ and ‘proletarian literature’ from the viewpoint of ‘ethnic cultural heritage’. That is, it is a project with the concentric structure with ‘anti-Japanese revolutionary literature’, which was said to be Ilsung Gim’s ‘creation’, as a nucleus. Therefore, it is needless to say that from the viewpoint of subjective art and literature theory it is cultural political planning which has rearranged each work by scouting for a new meaning in it. Just as ‘A Complete Collection of Modern Literature’ of South Korea is ‘a product of high culture’ under a capitalistic system, ‘An Anthology of Modern Josun Literature’ of North Josun is ‘a political advertisement’ under a socialistic system. In fact, collections of canons were reconstructed in different ways according to a capitalistic or socialistic system, or such desire was revealed. In the present reality, a study on North Josun literature may also enable me to find a new directionality or possibility beyond others’ eyes of South and North literature. Of course, a logic of self-relativization is necessary where the subject and others are put together and met beyond the subject’s subjectivity.