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The oxymoron of ‘Enlightenment Literature’ and the romantic fervor

  • Chunwon Research journal
  • Abbr : Chunwon Research journal
  • 2020, (17), pp.47-82
  • DOI : 10.31809/crj.2020.04.17.47
  • Publisher : Chunwon Research Society
  • Research Area : Humanities > Korean Language and Literature > Korean Literature
  • Received : March 15, 2020
  • Accepted : April 10, 2020
  • Published : April 30, 2020

Yang Soon Mo 1

1연세대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

In relation to Lee Kwang-soo's literature, we would like to discuss 'freedom' that we have not been paying enough attention to. As the start of Korean modern literature, Lee Kwang-soo has raised the issue of emotional liberation from knowledge and morality more advanced than anyone else, but has been regarded as a crack writer who had been forced to suppress it in the name of "enlightment" and "ethnicity." While he ideologically formulated independent and autonomous literature with a focus on "jeong-情," that literature was hard to avoid being restored as a national tool under the urgent political and social fate of the time. Specifically, today's crack assessment of Lee Kwang-soo's literature is as follows. The study of Lee Kwang-soo's literature, which has centered on a rift called "Mujeong" has placed the ideology of liberalism and nationalism on each side of the crack, and the comprehensive interpretations of sealing the rift around either of the two ideologies have made the majority of Lee Kwang-soo's. Of course, that crack reveals points that cannot eventually be aggregated in terms of assessment, but these cracks function in a significant and productive direction by triggering several attempts to aggregate the cracks, such as to confront the fundamental dilemma of liberalism called 'individual/community'. In this interpretation, however, the freedom of pure denial, as Hegel said, is lost, and only the second (individual) and third (community) are left. In other words, as Lee's claim of "jeong" is reduced to "individual" (second freedom), and that "jeong-individual" is placed in a tense relationship with the "community," the use and value of literature is determined under a certain political philosophical point of view, with the radical and typographical dimension of "jeong" claimed by Lee not fully considered. In other words, modern Korean literature based on the above cracks called Lee Kwang-soo loses Lee Kwang-soo as a madness. By rereading the literary theory of "Jeong," which Lee claimed, we would like to confirm that the literature of "Jeong" is an independent one that cannot be entirely reverted to "individual" and at the same time is a key point in forming that community, rather than an element that always causes discord with "community." Based on this, the article wants to synthesize Lee Kwang-soo, which has been bisected by cracks, but insists that the synthesis can be possible by the perversive synthesis, passing through the door of "the autonomy of literature." In sum, by claiming that the Enlightenment-Literature is not a relationship between cracks and oppression, but a relationship of mutual need under a perversive structure, it does not introduce "ethnic" and "imagination" to remove and utilize the excessive type of "jeong," but instead, it argues that it was able to protect that "literature of jeong" and "romantic literature" full of religiousity.

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