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Exclusion and Amplification of Sadness Shown in 『Jeonseon Munhak』

  • Korean Language & Literature
  • 2012, (83), pp.393-423
  • Publisher : Korean Language & Literature
  • Research Area : Humanities > Korean Language and Literature

Jeong Myung Jung 1

1전남대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This study analyzed the texts in the magazine entitled 『Jeonseon Munhak (War Front Literature)』 published in the period of the Korean War in 1950's in the context of emotion-politics. Especially, two patterns were intensively examined; how sadness as emotional material is excluded, or amplified on the contrary in them. First of all, in the respect of exclusion of sadness, the study reviewed the process which the material of individual unique sadness is excluded or sanitized as unharmful, or replaced with other materials. In the process, it proved that how the unique event of others' death is materialized or idealized, getting included in the system of the ratio logic or exchange of equivalents. In the other hand, in the respect of amplification of sadness, what was studied is the operation of moral and theological mechanism that drives various individual emotions into an enormous form of sadness persistent and also repetition-compulsive. It was also found that the mechanism can not help containing a fatal moment that individual or collective passive emotion can be converted into fanaticism or madness. Those two contexts are inseparable, but they are intentionally divided in this description. First, the study dealt with war writers' ethical blind spot in that they tried removing others' specific existence with no restraint and inattentively, by reviewing the exclusion of sadness. And then, by reviewing the amplification of sadness, this tried reading the structure of collective, nearly unconscious, ideology symptomatically on which writers strongly depended to draw people to war mobilization. It was also expected that doing that would allow us to reconstruct totalitarianism or nationalism ideology in the context of emotional politics.

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.

This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.