‘언어=사실’의 세계 ― 전쟁과 르포르타주

Abstract

This article intends to contemplate political and aesthetic issues related to reportage writing, focusing on the critical situation during wartime that colonial Korean writers were forced to produce reportage literature (bogomunhak) as an representative literary form of the "century of facts". At the critical moment of order, values, and norms, the existing relationships between words and things collapse or are in jeopardy, and then a way to forge new relationship can be found. Reportage writing has been a response to the demand to confront the facts of the time in the crisis. It can be said that Avant-Garde criticism of the art of autonomy after World War I, the propaganda and solidarity of Marxist cultural movements as well as military literature during wartime from the Asia-Pacific War to the Korean War were such responses. Imperial Japan's wartime system captured Korean literature in the front/rear political-semantic dispositif to set the state of exception as usual and forced it to report the "FACT" of the front lines. Accordingly, reportage, as writing of crisis, integrated into the official media although the institutional basis of modern literature and the myth of individual autonomy had been seriously questioned. Reportage writing during wartime could not overcome the autistic characterization to limit the literature itself to a 'report.' However, reportage as an anti/semi-genre marked by promptness, de-individuality, and organizing ability retains its potential as part of its practice to link up separate things and to employ literature otherly.