프로문학의 정치적 상상력 : 김남천 문학에 나타난 ‘칸트적인 것’들

Abstract

This paper explores the political imagination in Korean proletarian literature in the colonial era as a way of critical review of recent discourses on the 'literature and politics'. In particular, I focus on Kim Namcheon's literary works as a representative text of the 'conversion literature' that shed a new light on the current issue of the 'literature and politics'. Kim is one of the most unique writers who never gave up his vision of new political practices under the severe political suppression at the late colonial period. Kim's literary spirit of 'self-indictment' is not only limited to the series of his criticism that have been commonly understood as the 'literature of indictment', but it also illuminates Kim's specific complex embedded in his long literary career. Literature, for Kim, originated from a writer's ultimate vision of freedom, a freedom that is necessarily subject to his specific position in reality. Resonating with Immanuel Kant, Kim set out to develop literary criticism based on the notion of a writer's 'freedom'. Thus, Kim's concern with 'conversion literature' is also specifically related to the Kantian ethics. Kim's short story "Fidelity"(1943) is a telling example that dramatizes the question of 'fidelity' and 'freedom' of a converted writer in the late colonial era. Taken as a whole, Kim Namcheon is a problematic writer who attempts to go beyond the barren imagination of politicism thereby rehabilitating the richness of political imagination in Korean proletarian literature.