Harvard East Asian Monographs, 357. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center; Harvard University Press [distributor], 2013. ix, 235 pp. US$39.95, cloth. ISBN 978-0-674-07326-5.
It was not until the late 1990s or early 2000s that the obstinate dichotomy that saw Korean modernization during the colonial era only in terms of nationalism/anti-nationalism began to break up. According to this dichotomy Korean modernity and its culture could be understood and evaluated only from the perspective of resistance—rather, direct resistance—to Japanese imperialism. Simply put, all the lives and cultural products of colonial Korea had value only insofar as they directly and effectively manifested such resistance. These superficial binaries—of nation vs. anti-nation, resistance vs. collaboration, and anti-Japan vs. pro-Japan—had constituted the Korean imagining of the colonial period.
Our understanding of Korean literature of this period has also been based upon a binary outlook, with scholars viewing Korean colonial literature through such schemata as realism vs. modernism, content vs. form, the real vs. the aesthetic, etc., with literary history narrated on the assumption of the former’s superiority over the latter. Such an approach also began to collapse only in the late 1990s.
Freed from such binary schemata and a methodology that had worked so well, scholars were then faced with two salient characteristics of modernity itself: contradiction and irony. Since the 2000s, this irony has resulted in ample achievements in the study of colonial Korean literature. Korean scholars were better able to understand the complexity and multi-layered character of the colonial period, which in turn allowed them to reflect more deeply on the idea of modernity itself.
Christopher Hanscom’s book, The Real Modern: Literary Modernism and the Crisis of Representation in Colonial Korea, reflects such a tendency in Korean studies. What Hanscom first suggests from his meticulous, elaborate reading of the works of Pak T’aewŏn, Kim Yujong, and Yi T’aejun, representative authors of Korean modernist fiction, is a strong and valid anti-thesis to the schema of realism vs. modernism and the assumption of the former’s superiority over the latter. According to Hanscom, these authors reveal “the distrust of a positive basis for both perceiving and representing the ‘real’ of a predetermining actuality” (15). This distrust makes their works “more real than real” as a sort of “hyperrealism” (15). He defines the literary-historical situation of colonial Korea in the 1930s as a time “when the transparency of language itself, the unproblematic correlation of signifier and reference that arguably compromised the basis of both realist and formalist aesthetic practices, came into question” (80). By doing so, he lifts the stigma placed on these authors, such as “escape from the real” and “art-for-art’s sake,” and redefines their literary works and practices as “a response to the loss of faith in language as a ‘crisis of representation’ prevalent in Seoul literary circles in the 1930s” (13).
Above all, Hanscom attempts to move beyond the long-held dichotomy of universality vs. particularity regarding the colonial era by reading their modernist works as recognition of the crisis of representation and a reflection on the impossibility of linguistic communication in the 1930s. If we follow this dichotomy, we cannot but choose between universality and particularity. If we understand colonial thought and culture only in terms of universality, it may lead to our approval of European hegemony and collaboration with imperialism. On the other hand, if we insist on the so-called colonial particularity, it may mean ignoring the universality of world history, ending with either self-contempt or narcissism through the privileging a local particularity. This conundrum often found in the study of colonial modernity is a major problem that no scholar of colonialism can escape. As Hanscom clarifies, the first aim of this book is “to rethink Korean literary history in relation to a redefinition of modernism outside the Eurocentric/native binary” (17). In other words, Hanscom attempts in his book “to retain an attentiveness to the literary and historical context while also reaching beyond a model of ‘European diffusionism’ that understands non-Western cultural products as either radically different from or as derivative of the West” (17). In my view, this is one of the most significant achievements of his work. His theoretical approach is very effective in abolishing the old-fashioned, comparative perspective which continues to frame the study of colonial as well as contemporary literature. Ultimately, Hanscom’s approach will lead us to acquire a transnational perspective from which we can newly understand world history and culture, replacing the old perspectives of nationalism as well as its extension, internationalism.
Chul Kim
Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea
pp. 455-457