The Achievements and Limitations of the Socialist Narrative Based on the Experience of the Lower Classes: Kang, Kyeong-ae『Human Problem』 (하층민 체험에 기초한 사회주의 서사의 성취와 한계: 강경애 『인간문제』)

Song, In Hwa (송인화)

The Achievements and Limitations of the Socialist Narrative Based on the Experience of the Lower Classes: Kang, Kyeong-ae『Human Problem』

The Journal of General Education
2022, (21), pp.349~380
Publisher : Da Vinci Mirae Institute of General Education
Research Area : Social Science > Education > Field of Education > General Education
Received : September 20, 2022
Accepted : October 17, 2022
Published : October 31, 2022

Song, In Hwa ¹

¹한세대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This article is aimed at reading the novel 『Human Problem』, which is recognized as the best realist novel of the colonial period, and seeks to examine the achievements and limitations of the work with a focus on the “experience”. While creating works based on socialist ideologies, which were actively embraced by colonial intellectuals as the progressive ideology of the transformation of reality, he focused on the experience of the lower classes, which is characteristic of the fiction that transforms from contemporary socialist works, and focuses on how to approach and solve the problem of the lower classes, the universal human problem of capitalist society. In the meantime, the research and achievements of 『The Human Problem』have been carried out through the methodology of socialist realism, but it is believed that the meaning of the work as well as the achievements and limitations of the work can be broadly understood by reading the work through the unique themes and aesthetic features emphasized in the work without agreeing with certain ideologies, but also as an attempt to figure out how to read the work as a classic for university liberal arts education. From this point of view, when reading 『The Human Problem』 with a focus on the experience of the lower class, the work depicts the unjust oppression and suffering that the lower class peasants receive from their landowners and capitalists, mainly in the rural areas and cities. By emphasizing the experience of the characters and recreating the experience from their perspective, the suffering and oppression of the lower classes are realistically revealed. The contradiction of underclass' inability to enjoy human dignity and life by exploiting the price of their labour by landowners and capitalists is represented in this process. The experience of the work of the lower classes serves as an inevitable occasion for them to grow into agents of future real transformation, so that in the work labor is presented as the only way to solve the problems of the lower classes. Therefore, the intellectual, who is a theoretical warrior who accepts and educates socialist ideology, is located outside of the experience of work and is not recognized as the main body of social movement. Thus the privileged conception of labour as a homogeneous concept leads to the secondary or suppression of disparate contradictions within. The beautification of women's work as a woman's natural task and the reproduction of highly educated new women through images of the body as icons of luxury and debauchery fail to secure critical distance from the male-centered perspectives that internalize discrimination against women. Progressive transformation through socialist ideology and conservative consciousness coexists in contradictions.

KEYWORDS

Kang, Kyeong-ae, 『Human Problem』, Experience, Labor, Oppression, Reality Transformation, Intellectual, New-Women, Contradictory Coexistence.

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