Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017. xii, 286 pp. (Illustrations.) US$65.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-5036-0168-0.
With the publication of Figuring Korean Futures: Children’s Literature in Modern Korea, Dafna Zur has opened a new window for us to peer in and upon the colonial period of Korea’s modern history. In spite of (or perhaps because of) this period’s importance, it remains opaque, difficult to see in any comprehensive sense due to the competing narratives that tend to obscure more than elucidate. This book approaches (mostly) the colonial period from a heretofore relatively untapped source of analysis: children’s literature and the changing role of the child/adolescent in Korea’s transformation into a modern state, both under Japanese colonial rule and in the immediate aftermath of liberation.
The central organizing theme of the book is the discovery and subsequent semiotic development of the notion of the “child-heart.” According to Zur, one of the changes that Korea underwent at the turn of the nineteenth century was that children became actors in the nation’s development instead of merely passive witnesses, and this made the advent of children’s literature not only possible but necessary. Zur points out that it was the child’s new “visibility,” facilitated by changes that accompanied the modernization process, that made such literature necessary: “The demand for children’s literature was created in part out of the anticipation of expanding literacy and in part out of a need to ‘translate’ the world on behalf of the next generation, who were entering a markedly different world” (5).
One of Zur’s aims in this book is to show that the “child-heart” was not some a priori characteristic, a kind of sui generis entity, but was a “constructed and profoundly artificial structure” that “prompted the production of a rich and diverse body of texts and images that inscribed, both literally and figuratively, pasts, presents, and futures on the bodies and souls of the young” (7).
The book’s first two chapters explore the advent and development of youth and children’s magazines in the early and mid-colonial period, from just before annexation up until the early 1930s, starting with Ch’oe Nam-sŏn’s Sonyŏn (1908–1911), or Youth. One of Ch’oe’s projects in Sonyŏn was to “rescue” the child from outdated cultural practices and envision new possible social outcomes for them. The focus shifted from youth to children in the 1920s with the publication of Orini, or Child(ren) (1923–1931) led by Pang Chŏng-hwan. In discussing how the cultural and social landscapes were changing, Zur points to the rise of youth groups and their affiliated literary movements, the growing number of schools and increasing literacy, and the slow expansion of an imagined community of children, creating the conditions for the emergence of the “child-heart” that heralded a new “discursive shift.” She unpacks the implications of these developments in print and visual culture in superlative prose:
I argue that this seemingly apolitical foundation of children’s literature, which celebrated the child-heart, and with it gave rise to the currency of childhood, can be read as future aspirations dressed up in nostalgic impulses that were political in their very essence. The disavowal of culture and politics as having any bearing on the child’s complicity in colonial modernity made the child-heart, or tongsim in Korean, politically saturated to an extent that has previously been unrecognized. (49)
Chapter 3, titled, “Writing the Language of the Child-Heart,” discusses how the Korean language was undergoing changes and developing in order to more effectively depict the new realities of modernity. Such developments, including “the invention of a written language for children” were concerned with the efforts to unify the written and spoken languages into a commonly apprehendable vernacular that could serve as a bulwark against “encroaching imperialism and the imminent loss of political power” (76). This included efforts to create a “child-friendly” language for young readers.
Chapter 4 discusses how children’s literature was employed by the socialist left in attempts to appropriate children into their political cause, and chapter 5 looks at how it was used to indoctrinate children into the ideology of sacrifice for the empire.
In the last chapter, Zur discusses what she describes as the “battle over the minds and bodies of Korean children in post-liberation Korea” (163). One of the longest running magazines from the period between liberation and the outbreak of the war was Chugan sohaksaeng (Young student weekly). Zur explains how this magazine set about instilling a sense of cultural pride in young Koreans by extolling the virtues of such things as the Korean language, Korea’s natural beauty, and famous personages like Yi Sun-sin. In order to create a narrative in which the colonial period was a small footnote in a long, illustrious history, recovery of the national language progressed in tandem with the attempt to reconnect with pre-colonial history in order to create a “seamless line between the distant past and the present” (172). This reification of a contiguous narrative linking past and present was the imperative that children’s magazines of the period were conscious of in their editorial strategies.
Figuring Korean Futures: Children’s Literature in Modern Korea is a valuable contribution to the literary history of the colonial and postcolonial period. With this publication, Zur provides scholars and casual readers alike with an exhaustively researched and masterfully written analysis of how the Korean child was imagined, appropriated, entertained, mobilized, and educated through children’s literature in the tumultuous first half of the twentieth century in Korea. The only flaw I could find was when Zur mistakenly identified the kirogi (wild goose) as a seagull (and several minor typos), a testament to how well written the book is. Personally speaking, I found Zur’s analysis of primary literary sources so illuminating that I was disappointed she didn’t bring her scholarship to bear on how children’s literature was employed during the Pak Chŏng-hŭi regime (1961–1979). Perhaps in a second volume?
Steven D. Capener
Seoul Women’s University, Seoul, South Korea