Writing the boundaries of the divided nation: The works of Son Ch'ang-sop, Ch'oe In-hun, Nam Chong-hyon, and Lee Ho-chul.

摘要

Focusing on works produced from the mid 1950s to the mid 1960s by four South Korean writers, Son Ch'ang-sop (1922-- ), Nam Chong-hyon (1933-- ), Ch'oe In-hun (1936-- ), and Lee Ho-chul (1932-- ), this dissertation examines the ways in which literary discourse intersects with the attempt by intellectuals to locate the position of the recently-formed South Korea in the cold war world, its relation, as one term of the divided nation, with communism, anticommunism, liberal democracy, modernization, and the "West."; Beginning in the mid 1950s, in conditions in which the formation of leftist literature was unthinkable, existentialism provided a way to introduce a subject of resistance in postwar South Korea. I link the representation of the existential subject in Son's 1950s works to the ways in which literary and intellectual discourse from April 19, 1960 (the date of demonstrations leading to the demise of the Syngman Rhee regime), to May 16, 1961 (Park Chung Hee's military takeover), constructed the "April Revolution" as enabling both the possibility of national unification and the emergence of the "proper" subject of liberal democracy.; I discuss how the post-May 16 works of Ch'oe, Nam, and Lee contested a state orthodox narrative of modernization that eschewed "Western style" liberal democracy and asserted the primacy of economic rights. I examine, further, representations of the ROK-Japan Normalization Treaty (1965) as placing South Korea on a neocolonial trajectory of modernization characterized by a combination of economic development within the global capitalist system, domestic political authoritarianism, and shared U.S.-Japanese hegemony.; The limits of the critique of South Korea's place in the "free world" in the works of Son, Ch'oe, Nam, and Lee point to the ways in which South Korean literature (Han'guk munhak) was produced following the Korean War and in the early 1960s by the drawing of a literary border between itself and North Korean literature (Choson munhak ), by its relation, spoken or unspoken, to this border. I detail how the construction of this boundary set the trajectory not only for the reproduction of Han'guk munhak, but also for the contestations of its enforcement.