Literature of the bittersweet: Kim Sung-ok and 1960s Korea.

摘要

This dissertation examines the relationships between the literature of the South Korean novelist Kim Sung-ok (b. 1941) and his 1960s socio-cultural surroundings. Kim's literature simultaneously portrayed the bitter and the sweet of everyday 1960s life in an attempt to provide a balanced view of the vicissitudes of a society in transition. Although Kim was regarded as the voice of an emerging new generation, literary history now regards the 1960s as the era of ideologically-motivated debate between pure and engagement literatures. Kim therefore stands in a paradoxical position within literary history because he had deliberately distanced himself from this dominant literary paradigm. Mainstream criticism continues to selectively focus on Kim's wit and linguistic flair in order to bypass the balanced content of his stories that is fundamentally at odds with the pure/engagement framework. In this dissertation, I move away from the ideological constraints of literary history in order to reconstitute the social significance of Kim's literature. His immense popularity during the very period he was addressing suggests a deep resonance between the bittersweet in his literature and the tremendous flux in his society. I argue that Kim is a uniquely poised mediator of the 1960s in that the popularity of his works allows us to view the social tensions addressed in his works as fundamentally significant guideposts of a drastically changing society. Kim's mediation focuses our attention on three crucial arenas of cultural contestation in everyday 1960s life: the continued specter of the Korean War, an ambivalence regarding the onset of modernity, and a new sensitivity to the cultural and linguistic possibilities of a post-division South Korea. Moreover, Kim's mediation and its critical reception point to similar growing pains in intellectual history. My analysis of Kim's literature foregrounds the ideological and generational differences that dominated literary criticism in a debate that was more about intellectual supremacy and less about actual literary production. In rejecting ideology and focusing instead on everyday life, Kim's literature of the bittersweet constituted a project of relief and reconciliation---a project that highlighted the social and intellectual tensions in this transitional moment in modern Korean history.