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Therefore, the Issue Is Literature: A Few Critical Suggestions on Recent Cultural Study

  • DONAM OHMUNHAK
  • Abbr : 돈암
  • 2017, 32(), pp.135~170
  • DOI : 10.17056/donam.2017.32..135
  • Publisher : The Donam Language & Literature
  • Research Area : Humanities > Korean Language and Literature > Korean Literature > History of Korean Literature
  • Published : December 31, 2017

류보선 1

1군산대학교

Candidate

ABSTRACT

The primary purpose of this paper is to do a careful reading of Munhaksa ihuui munhaksa(Literary History after Literary History) and Heoyongdoen buron(Permissible Rebellion), books that comprehensively survey the cultural research carried out after the mid-90s and also present a direction for future research. Reading these two books gives us the opportunity to examine the accomplishments of cultural studies and to look at ways of future research. In Munhaksa ihuui munhaksa, cultural researchers count as the fruits of their research the return of “literatures” and “cultures” previously excluded from literary history that until then was centered on nationalism, men, and the elites, and showing the possibility of “plural literary histories.” This evaluation should not be taken as self-praise. Indeed, cultural research since the mid-90s has drawn several important elements into the realm of literary history, such as subcultures, historical geographies, gender oppression, literary debut systems, which earlier literary history did not talk about or even repressed. And thanks to this, we have the conditions to establish a new genealogy of Korean literature. Heoyongdoen buron is a compilation of research on the colonial censorship system that emerged as an important part of cultural politics studies after the late 90s. It includes almost all areas related to colonial censorship, such as what censorship devices were used by the censors that made it impossible to “write what one wanted to write” and what it was that writers of that period “couldn’t write.” The post mid-90s cultural research that broadened the horizon of Korean literary research now stands at a crossroads: Will Korean intellectuals will carry out meaningful genealogical practice or will their research decline to meaninglessly listing unordered subcultures. This is related to how researchers engaged in cultural studies after the mid-90s view literature. As they move the focus of their research from “literature to cultural studies,” they oversimplify the act, institution, form, or practice of literature. To them, literature is merely an agent of the symbolic order that suppresses subcultures. As a result, they believe that they can dismantle the existing symbolic order simply by returning the subculture to the literary form. However, this brings about the adverse effect of covering up the violence of the symbolic order by only criticizing the literary practice that resists the symbolic order. Thus, in order to invent the “literary history after literary history” or “plural literary histories” that recent cultural research dreams of, “cultural research without literature” should change to “cultural research with culture” or “cultural research with literature.” In other words, recent cultural research can attain its original purpose of dismantling the symbolic order when it compares, contrasts, and infers the research into the cultural sphere in which they are interested with a serious archaeological exploration of the history and status of literature. Thus, paradoxically, the most crucial question in current cultural and literary research is what literature was, is, and will be. In other words, the issue is still literature.

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