두 개의 ‘별들의 고향’과 ‘청년문화’의 의도적 접속

Abstract

Discussions on youth culture in South Korea exploded starting from Heavenly Homecoming to Star, which set an unprecedented box-office record in the areas of novel and film in the early 1970s. Thus, Heavenly Homecoming to Star is considered as if it is an integration of youth culture, but the identity of the youth culture has not been clearly proven, and it should be made clear that active discussions could be achieved after the publication and release of the two versions of Heavenly Homecoming to Star. Therefore, instead of confirming youth culture through Heavenly Homecoming to Star, a discussion on what really made it possible to connect two versions of Heavenly Homecoming to Star and ‘youth culture.’ The two versions of Heavenly Homecoming to Star were the works very appropriate for attracting the public in the 1970s in that they were expressed in a way that they stimulate the readers and audiences’ sensibility. This characteristic of sensibility can be considered a cause that made people evaluate them novel on one hand and very popular on the other hand, which made natural its connection to young consumers newly flowed in. Young people who responded to Heavenly Homecoming to Star were considered abrupt through the media that had continued introducing Western youth culture since the 1960s, and then, discussions on the youth culture of South Korea spread. The ambivalence to reveal the Korea’s complex about its youth culture as that of an underdeveloped country as compared to those of the West and at the same time, cleverly compare advanced cultures with Korean youth culture equally made a fire in a controversy of youth culture. As the controversy began, college students would redefine youth culture to regain their identity as young intellectuals, opposing to the interpellation of the name of ‘youth’ in the work of Heavenly Homecoming to Star. Youth culture, at this time, is converted to a meaning different from that in the controversy of youth culture, and no controversy occurs anymore. In other words, youth culture in the 1970s cannot be viewed by a single concept, and the beginning of youth culture or early youth culture is a combination of young people’s response to the novelty of the two versions of Heavenly Homecoming to Star with the desire of the times, and it is a concept that is floating, according to the situation in which it is placed or the subject of interpellation, there is a clear substance.