김윤식 비평과 문학사론, 총체성과 가치중립성 사이 -신비평에서 루카치로의 행로

Abstract

This paper focuses on the early part of the literary studies and criticisms of Kim Yun-sik(1935-), who is a representative critic as well as a literary historian in Korea. I argue that his early works were in a period of a theoretical transition from New Criticism to György Lukács. Along with existentialism, New Criticism bifurcated the South Korean literary field and the realm of criticism after the liberation. New Criticism was the supreme theory at that time that ensured the academians their self-verification within the literary field and the university system in South Korea where anticommunism and American supremacy mainly dominated. Kim initiated his study with the methodology of New Criticism around1960s, and proceeded with Lukácsian history of literature around 1970. However, this transition was not the result of abrupt ideological /theoretical conversion. Elliot, Lukács, and Kim shared a concomitant feature:It was their will to believe literary form as a mythical tool or illusion that could achieve totality under the modern society. For example, for Lukács, the path in which a problematic individual chose to go became an adventure for his/her lost-totality, because this individual attempted to identify his/her ideal with the world that he/she learned from experience. Lukács’s idea had a common with that of Elliot as well as of his successors, the New Critics, since they built the mythical tool of regulation and order between tradition and individual or sensibility and thought. For Kim, the transition from Elliot to Lukács was a vision that enabled to integrate not only national history with universal history, but also ideology with literature. In this vision, Kim conducted his literary research on the continuity of the history of Korean literature and the universality of Korean literature as an individual literature, thus proving their intersection with political-economic history as well as with intellectual history. Despite Kim’s transition to Lukács, the mythical tool of Elliot or the inheritance of New Criticism was not absolutely banished. For example, it is true that Kim suggested the system or the concept of modernity as value-neutrality when his criticism (=theory of literary history) was fully developed. His suggestion was driven from his will to draw the overview of the history of modern Korean literature. However, it is also true that there was a certain urge, which penetrates his criticism (=theory of literary history), to summon every history and various values to a single frame and relieve competing facts and conflicts as a part of the whole named of 'Modern Korean Literature'. Kim’s mode of literary history ('History of modern Korean literature as a epic'), in a way, exactly repeated Elliot’s modern epic, which was a mythical tool. Thus, Kim’s criticism of redemption always had to confront with the crisis of being criticized for relativism and the violation of the principle of the excluded middle.