Politicizing the aesthetic: The dialectics of poetic production in late twentieth-century South Korea, 1960--1987 (Kim Suyong, Kim Chiha, Pak Nohae, Hwang Ji-woo).

摘要

Through close and symptomatic readings of poetry, this study examines how aesthetics and politics interact. Analyzing South Korean literary production from 1960 to 1987, it pays attention to how poetry interacted with sociopolitical field and how South Korean aesthetics developed through this exchange. An ongoing dialectical exchange existed whereby political oppression and censorship helped to produce "political" poetry, and this poetry contributed to a resistance culture which struggled against authoritarian politics. By focusing on the work of four political poets who also became culturally influential, it also investigates these three decades of South Korean poetry and culture to see what facilitated the creation of a poetry that successfully advanced both progressive aesthetics and politics.; The poets studied are Kim Suyong (1921--1968), Kim Chiha (1941-- ), Pak Nohae (1957-- ), and Hwang Ji-woo (1952-- ). Four sociohistorical events, which were crucial to these poets' development and to South Korea's political development, punctuate this study: the 1960 April Revolution, the Yushin years under Park Chung Hee, the 1980 Kwangju Massacre, and the 1987 mass demonstrations which resulted in "democratic liberalization." Through historicized, close readings of poems and through the aesthetic theories of Marx, Benjamin, Adorno, Delia Volpe, and Althusser, I examine South Korean poetic production in light of materialist aesthetics through the technique of symptomatic reading. Several of the most popular (or, best-selling and now canonical) poets of this period, especially the four studied here, wrote major works as responses to significant instances of political oppression and under the censorship of Korea's National Security Law (by which any writing or action critical of the government was illegal).; After an introductory chapter, Chapter Two analyzes the discourse of literary nationalism from the 1960s in order to examine the logic and effects of Korea's confrontation with the "West" and South Korea's confrontation with its own image and place in the world. Chapter Three works to revise idealist, Kantian aesthetic theory and elaborate a critical negative aesthetics based on materialist philosophy. Chapters Four through Seven analyze the poetry, aesthetic techniques, and sociohistorical contexts of the poets Kim Suyong, Kim Chiha, Pak Nohae, and Hwang Ji-woo.