Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2015. xii, 235 pp. US$58.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-3987-1.
In an era of cross-disciplinary cultural studies, it is refreshing to find a book like Writers of the Winter Republic, which focuses on the study of literature and treats its subject matter with utmost respect and care. The book’s approach is as useful as it is necessary to convey the ethos and significance of the cultural scene of 1970s South Korea, which was a time when literature enjoyed an extraordinary moral and cultural authority. The democratization decades of the 1970s and the 1980s was indeed a period when literature was “simultaneously art and more than art—a testimony, a rehearsal in revolution, a gospel of salvation, and ultimately a ‘second government’” (180). At the core of the book lies the question of how writers managed to turn literature into such a potent form of social critique and political defiance even in the context of intense censorship and the government’s control of national media. Youngju Ryu, a professor of modern Korean literature at the University of Michigan, pursues this question through four case studies on major writers—Kim Chi-ha, Yi Mun-gu, Cho Se-hŭi, and Hwang Sŏk-yŏng—all of whom have been canonical figures of minjung (common people) literary realism, a dissident aesthetic that in many ways represented political and economic alienation under South Korea’s succession of the dictatorial regimes.
The book’s four chapters are each organized around defining tropes of the writers’ work, such as the outlaw bandit, the neighbour, or the homeless drifter. This organization is effective in highlighting the great thematic and stylistic diversity among the writers, along with their individuality. Chapter 1 examines the writings of Kim Chi-ha, the most iconic face of 1970s dissident literature, with a focus on his famous narrative poem “Five Bandits.” Ryu provides a detailed account of how this scathing parody of the corrupt elites effectively inaugurated a populist form of dissident literature by ingeniously appropriating the traditional poetic form of p’ansori. The book’s publication landed Kim in prison with a death sentence in 1974. As Ryu shows, the public outrage over the incarceration gave rise to the Chayu silch’ŏn munin hyŏpŭihoe [the association of writers for freedom and praxis; 1974-1987], to which both Yi Mun-gu and Hwang Sŏk-yŏng belonged.
Chapters 2 and 3 organically revolve around the central thematic trope of the book, the Levinasian figure of the neighbour as the congenial other, a stranger with whom one shares spatial and social proximity and for whom one should care out of an ethical choice rather than calculation. In Yi Mun-gu’s episodic portraits of rural villagers in works such as Kwanch’on Essays and Our Neighborhood, Ryu argues, the figure of the neighbour counters the rhetoric of Cold War identity politics by opposing individual humanity in its concrete presence to its ideological abstraction. As Ryu writes, Yi’s fragmented narrative form, which resembles the traditional biography of chŏn more than the modern novel, “attests to the violence of the stories it must narrate, and to the ultimate failure of the struggle to suture the wounds in the communal body” in the divided Koreas (76). The idea of kindness to strangers also anchors Ryu’s reading of Cho Sehŭi in chapter 3, whose lyrical omnibus novel The Dwarf commands a towering status in Korean literary history. The novel’s multi-perspectival, stream-of-consciousness narrative achieves important political effects, Ryu suggests, in two ways: by contesting the homogenous teleological time of national developmentalism through temporal montage, and by presenting a reportage-like account of state violence against vulnerable members of society through the allied voices of the victims and their middle-class neighbours. In these and other chapters, Ryu combines her careful reading of texts with a rich ethnographical study of the writers, for which she amply draws from personal interviews with writers and other literary figures as well as from newspaper articles, speeches, and court records.
The book brings us to the contemporary era in its last main chapter and the conclusion. Chapter 4 traces, through the key trope of “the drifter,” the literary trajectory of Hwang Sŏk-yŏng, who has given testimonial representations to virtually all major South Korean historical events—from participation in the Vietnam War, the 1970s labour union movement, the Kwangju uprising, to the 1980s national unification movement—and whose name epitomizes, along with a few others, 1980s minjung realism. Partly because of Ryu’s own ambivalence toward the more radicalized and doctrinally rigid literature of the 1980s, the chapter critiques Hwang’s belligerently masculine, patriarchal writings from a gendered perspective as much as it admires their rebellious call to action, which Ryu aptly characterizes as “mobility against mobilization” (140). Instead of Hwang’s recent, rather unconvincing experiments to globalize a Korean literature, Ryu turns in the conclusion to find a successor to the “warrior soul” of dissident literature in the works of Pak Min-gyu, whose surreal post-human stories of “irregulars,” that is, the precariat in neoliberal society, resist “the conjuncture of forces that makes human life less than humanly livable” (185). In this final analysis, Ryu may have done more to highlight Pak’s most characteristic science-fictional tropes, that of “the alien,” which at once expresses a profound sense of individual alienation and betrays the absurdity of a globally bipolarizing neoliberal social order.
As the first book-length study of 1970s South Korean literature, Writers of the Winter Republic fills an important critical gap in current Korean literary scholarship in English. The work stands at the crossroads of literary studies and political and intellectual history, and it makes for productive intersections with some of the most exciting scholarship in South Korean historical and cultural studies. The book will have its place among essential readings for students of postcolonial Korean literature and society along with Jin-kyung Lee’s Service Economies: Militarism, Sex Work, and Migrant Labor in South Korea (University of Minnesota Press, 2010) and Theodore Hughes’ Literature and Film in Cold War South Korea: Freedom’s Frontier (Columbia University, 2014). More broadly, the book also joins and augments Paul Chang’s Protest Dialectics: State Repression and South Korea’s Democracy Movement, 1970-1979 (Stanford University Press, 2015) in renewing our knowledge of the 1970s, which has often been regarded as sort of an overture of the democratization decade of the 1980s but is being recently rediscovered for its own epochal significance. Indeed, the author is leading this worthy critical intervention of historiographical relevance not only by authoring this book but also by editing a collected volume of critical essays, Cultures of Yusin: South Korea in the 1970s (forthcoming, University of Michigan Press).
Sunyoung Park
University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA
pp. 602-604