백대진 문학론 연구 - 1910년대 제국주의 자본주의의 내면화

초록

Baek Dae-jin, who wrote for Sinmun’gye and Pando siron in the 1910s, contributed to the formation of modern Korean literature through his writings on literary theory and his introductions to Western literary movements. Yet despite his significance as one of the earliest critics to articulate a theory of modern literature and to introduce movements such as naturalism, his role in Korean literary history has received relatively little sustained attention. This is partly because his literary theory amounted to little more than a compilation of Western knowledge and information about literature. Modern Korean literary theory is generally understood to have developed from the Enlightenment discourse of the 1910s to the aesthetic literary theories of the coterie magazines in the 1920s. Seen from this developmental perspective, Baek Dae-jin’s literary theory appears markedly heterogeneous in both content and orientation. This article argues that Baek’s literary thought was informed by the assimilationist theory of national strengthening that emerged in Japan and was partly grounded in liberal economic thought current in the 1910s. More specifically, this theory combined a political logic of assimilationism with an economic logic of civilizational enlightenment. Together, these formed two dimensions of the ideology that underwrote Japanese imperial expansion and, in turn, the expansion of nineteenth-century imperial capitalism. Baek’s literary theory assigns literature the role of cultivating the “individual” in ways that enable adaptation to this order. In this sense, the “literature for life” he advocates serves to cultivate a harsh recognition of modern civilization, governed by the natural law of the survival of the fittest, and the emotional reorientation needed to survive within that competitive order. By examining the key concepts of chŏngŭi (a composite of feeling and morality), nature, and life, this study demonstrates that Baek’s literary theory was grounded in the internalization of imperial capitalism in the 1910s. In doing so, it reconstructs a neglected aspect of literary theory in the 1910s, one that has been largely overlooked in accounts tracing the development of modern Korean literary thought from Sonyŏn and Ch’ŏngch’un to the coterie literature of the 1920s.

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