A Comparative Study of Korean Literature

Literary Migration

Sangjin Park

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781137557179
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137548825
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

This study in comparative literature reinterprets and reevaluates literary texts and socio-historical transitions, moving between the Korean, East Asian, and European contexts (and with particular reference to the reception of Dante Alighieri in the East). In the process, it reexamines the universality of literary values and reopens the questions of what literature is and what it can do. By close reading of texts, it aims to give exposure to Korean literature, in such a way as to attract more attention to the field of world literature  and to focus on what kind of relationship they can form and what new horizon of literariness they can construct in the future. This work will help to put the geography of world literature on a more open and just basis, by showing the porous nature of literary migration and supplying the missing links in the current discourse on world literature.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

Sangjin ParkA Comparative Study of Korean Literature10.1057/978-1-137-54882-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Sangjin Park¹

(1)

College of Liberal Arts, Busan University of Foreign Studies, Busan, Korea (Republic of)

End Abstract

1 Openness

The concept of my book is wholly based on the theory of openness, which provides a way of controlling the contingency of our knowledge and the world. I define “openness” as the process of an original organization of disorder, of oscillation between system and disorder, and of a play of presence and absence. Openness is a process or a field of individual, local, and decentered interpretation of the world and text, and an unending interaction between text and reality, which incessantly produces alternative or counter-interpretations. It is an anti-essentialist concept, for while essentialism operates unilaterally, and thus protects itself against the possibility of change, anti-essentialism does not postulate necessary identities and their relationships. The theory of openness allows for a text which produces no essential meaning with which everyone ought to agree. This implies the escape from dogmatic structures of thought and builds up the individual’s place in the margins of those structures.

My new theoretical context, which is open, porous, and “glocal” (both global and local), moves away from the system of binary oppositions to a comparative inquiry that concerns dynamic interactions among many heterogeneous points in such a way that they maintain their individualities. I have strived to apply my theoretical context and comparative inquiry to interpreting and evaluating literary texts and sociohistorical transitions while oscillating between Korean, East Asian, and European contexts. In this process, I tried to employ the role of a comparatist who should be able to understand and maintain the boundlessness of our approach to the text and the world. From such attempts my reading of Korean and European literatures obtained a uniqueness which does not derive merely from the rarity of comparative studies of these literatures; in fact, I was discussing the role of an interpretive act that can serve to bridge text and reality in a broader sense. Interpretation is directly linked to practicing our ethical and political responsibility, rather than merely excavating the internal coherence of the text or following the preestablished consensus. What matters here is that this kind of interpretive act is also linked to reexamining the universality of literary values, which needs to be highlighted with respect to the questions of what literature is and what it can do. Now we are faced with the consciousness of comparative literature.

I believe that the theory of openness can best operate in comparative study only if it relates itself to the way in which a subject may be bound to the contexts surrounding it. Comparative literature is not confined to merely comparing two or more texts but extends to measuring up our open attitude in facing our world and history. I want my book to be a useful example to show how openness operates in our acts of interpretation and further how much a literary text is said to hold true universal value (which differs from any kind of homogeneous universalism like “European Universalism,” to borrow a term from Immanuel Wallerstein). If by my close reading of some texts I wanted to expose Korean literature in such a way as to attract more attention to the field of world literature, it is because I needed to foreground the problem of what kind of relationship they can form with each other and what kind of new horizon of literariness they can construct in the future. It is true that I focused on reevaluating Korean literature, but it was inevitably possible only from the position of an Other, that of Western literature, for instance. That is, I was compelled to be the subject and at the same time the Other. Indeed this is the possible and useful strategy that a comparatist, if she or he does her or his job well, needs to adopt and maintain: the task of a comparatist is none other than enduring the boundlessness, the oscillation among plural positions, that the work of comparing a variety of literary texts requires. I would be pleased if my work could contribute to leading our comparative approach toward a more open horizon for our intellectual and ethical thought on literature. In this respect, I confess that a basis of political consciousness permeates this book. I emphasize that comparative literature is no longer a pure discipline, but a complex one in which we should be able to operate with more inclusive modes of thought.

This work has in fact led me to revive the concept and role of “openness” in our attempts to understand what literature is and can do. Although it was I myself who tried to expand the effect of the comparative approach, I needed someone who would encourage me to maintain such endless and constant work to reevaluate literary texts ranging from the classics to the post-modern era. Likewise, I hope that Korean literature will be taken as an object to be re-examined in world literature in a more democratic way. If in this process European literature could possibly become an object to be re-examined as well, that would also be a desirable outcome. In any case, I would like to emphasize that our interpretation of literary texts should be involved in a structure intermingled with world literature only insofar as the geography of world literature becomes a more open and just platform for exploring all local literatures. Thus I would say that in order to understand and evaluate a text more properly, we always need more bridges to link it to diverse horizons, which, I believe, can be provided by our more “open” attitude and methodology.

In this book, I aim to shed new light on Korean literary texts and the relevant discourses in relation to three key concepts: universalism, the Other, and literature. The capacity for self-negation is one of the essential conditions of literary universality. In other words, we should be able to define and control universality in that way. Without the ability of self-negation, a text allows for the creation of external borders, and at this very moment universality disappears. True universality does not omit the particulars or localities but goes beyond them by including them. The process in which a text includes the negations that occur inside and outside it is itself the essential content and condition for building the concept of universality in literature.

When universality excludes the particular or the local, surpassing them in the process, it makes them converge in its center, so as to be condensed within its boundary. This kind of universality is in fact nothing other than the particular or the local. The universal is constituted precisely by the process in which the particular escapes from its specific context while remaining nonetheless intact. In this sense, we can say that the particular and the local never oppose true universality. A text that excludes the particular cannot be said to be truly universal: if it does not include the universal, it is bound to appear universal only in its own peculiar context, precluding its reconstitution of the particular in all contexts. On this plane, the communicative relationship between the particular and the universal, between the plural particulars, becomes stagnant and instead only the oppositions between them prevail. Conversely, true universality, insofar as it is constituted in such a way as to recognize and maintain the particular and the local without succumbing to them, uses the particular in the process of spreading the universal to new localities. In this way, the particular and the local contribute to constructing truly “universal universality.”

Now we can say that the particular exists by opposing the “particular universality” and at the same time by identifying itself (indeed, the identity itself is open, fluid, and transparent as Jacques Derrida suggests); the particular maintains itself by de-homogenizing itself. In this process we can imagine the meaning of “remaining as the particular” (see especially the case of Yi Kwang-Su in Chap. 6) and the true universality that overcomes all kinds of binary oppositions. Therefore we need to pay more special attention to the practical mode of operation of the terms “universalization” or “universalizability” rather than universality.

Universalism is the political, economic, and cultural issue that we are now facing. In our inevitably flawed globalization, universalism can be considered as a concept that can lead globalization to take on a more positive aspect. However, it should be emphasized that the concept of universalism, in reality, operates with a negative effect. So-called European universalism is only one example; by pursuing such universal values as justice, human rights, and civilization on a Eurocentric basis, it makes them particular instead. In reality, since the Renaissance in the fifteenth century, universalism has served as the motivating force for establishing the modern Western world. In relation to literature, universalism has been reproduced by inventing and maintaining the value of the canon, also called “the classics.” However, such a process of reproduction, by making universalism particular instead, has betrayed the original conception and spirit of universalism and canonicity.

Particularly in literature, universality can be conceptualized as a post-factum concept: it is not prescribed as a fixed norm but only constructed in the literary process. Here the literary process indicates circulation of the literary text in which the author sends out his or her recognition and expression of history, society, and his or her own inner self, and the reader receives, responds, and criticizes. Indeed literary texts bear the origin of a universality that can be established only by negating and escaping from itself. Universality, in the whole literary process, alters as it is intermingled with the particulars’ contexts; that is to say that universality maintains itself by altering. Universality is something that survives by being questioned in diverse contexts, enduring the “chopping board” of incessant reexamination. Therefore, we should say that the universality of literature is constituted in our acts of interpretation of the text: if the interpretation of a text is poor, its degree of universalizability is decreased while if it is rich, it is increased. How much a text has universal value depends on how much it opens itself to the interpretive acts that deconstruct and reconstruct it. It follows that we can only measure up the universality of a text rather than decide it, and further, the measuring varies according to the context.

Now the march of globalization has been unstoppable and irreversible, uprooting the local, which forces us to reconsider the problem of universality more seriously. The universal is the concept of evaluation. With this in mind, the term “world” in world literature needs to be understood in the sense of evaluating “literature” in diverse aspects, instead of indicating the privileged role of representing peripheral literary texts, and thereby world literature can play the new role of measuring up the differences and commonalities of literatures, instead of ruling over them as a standard. Therefore, we do not need to consider whether a literature becomes world literature or not, but to take the concept of world literature as the platform to help us reconsider universal literary value. We also need to recall that literature is a historical product bound to particular contexts and at the same time a universal construct beyond them (or rather, being bound to context should mean boundlessness, as Derrida holds). In relation to this, I would like to emphasize that Korean literature is, still and from now on, open to the broad horizon of reinterpretation and reevaluation. The consciousness of comparative literature, I believe, provides us with the theory, methodology, and attitude to maintain that openness so as to establish a dialogical relationship with world literature.

In all, in order to recover the authenticity of universality, we need to develop a discourse through which we can revive the location of the Other and operate in the role of the Other, and thereby suggest an example of criticism of it. This is because true universality has to possess the power to span all kinds of Others and to make them communicate with each other, and for this, making the Others participate in this process is necessary. Along with the transversal communication of the Others, the process of negating and surpassing itself and simultaneously maintaining itself is the condition of true universality.

2 Universality

This book relies on my comparative consciousness of national literatures, focusing particularly on the possible work of creating links between the Korean and European literatures. This work is directed toward reexamining their interaction so as to approach the horizon of a true universal value in literature as well as in human thought and activity. This work is built up on such founding ideas as openness, context, alteration, porousness, and boundlessness, which are all created and adopted to offer ways of reading that enable the coexistence of diverse human cultures. The interpretation of cultural metamorphoses shows the open and porous nature of literary migration and attempts to supply missing links in the current discourse on world literature, which seems not yet to have escaped from the trap of centrist thinking. Here arises our tireless will to constitute true universality in literariness by witnessing its own potential to be incessantly negated and renewed.

The problem of how to establish universality in literature, as mentioned above, is strictly related to otherness. As a scholar of comparative literature, I have strived to utilize the perspective of my in-between state to reconstruct critically the literary values produced in the non-Western world. What is most effective for this work is the reconsideration of the universality on which Western civilization has been based, and the reevaluation of non-Western literary works. While doing research on this double project, I, as the particular Other, aim to represent the Other who participates in establishing true universality.

For this purpose, I pursue in parallel the establishment of a theoretical basis and the analysis of Korean literary texts which are linked to the broader aim of the universal construction and practice of literary value. My discussion of the theoretical basis derives from such indispensable topics for my book as the contextual space of East Asia, modernity, and otherness, which are all linked to the issue of universality which we, as decision-making subjects, face in our “glocal” intellectual activities. The next step involves new interpretations of Korean literary texts by Kim Man-Jung, Sin Ch‘ae-Ho, and Yi Kwang-Su, which aim to reexamine the literary value of their works from the comparatist perspective. As a Dante scholar, I take the Italian writer Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy as a new platform for looking at the figures of literary migration in the space of (pre) modern Korea. Finally, I discuss how I can re-contextualize Korean literature and its universalizability and thereby submit this book as a comparative study of Korean literature pursued in its figures of literary migration. Here the issues of translation and alteration in the dimension of comparative literature are taken into consideration. In particular, observation of the Korean reception of Dante Alighieri leads me to observe Korean literature from a unique and soft perspective, with the effect of looking at it through the concept of migration, and reconsidering the so-called peripheral rebirth of universal language.

What matters here is to note that translation is a field in which diverse cultures encounter each other, rather than a condition by which the achievement of modernity is measured; the achievement of modernity has historically been a unilateral operation initiated at the center and directed toward the periphery, but in the realm of literature translation needs to be understood as a process that involves horizontal relations between cultures. Here we need to admit the comparative literature approach to translation, in which translation can be understood as a contextualized reconstruction in the receiving culture’s dimension.

How many contexts are required to evaluate a text properly depends on the text itself and the aims with which the text is read. Then we can say that the universality of a text derives from its power to overcome any specific space-time, which means that the text should be read differently depending on the space-time of a particular reading and yet at the same time maintain its consistency. This is what I would like to describe as alteration. A high level of diverse alteration, which requires the text to sustain its consistency along with its altered features, guarantees its universalizability. The original context of Dante’s Comedy still remains in Sin Ch‘ae-Ho’s Dream Sky, yet more importantly the scope of alteration in it was rather radical. The alteration rarely occurs directly: alteration needs distance, yet consistency tends to remove distance. I find here the power of universality which is nothing other than the power of embracing the presence and absence of distance.

Dante has his own particular world and all the notes of the Comedy are the supplements added to it. All the notes have the same rights: they color Dante’s particular world only until it maintains itself. The Comedy has been re-canonized by a process of intermingling the original and the alteration. Dream Sky is one instance of such a process: it testifies to the universality of the Comedy and more importantly becomes a new canonical work born in the cultural context of modern Korea, and furthers the lens through which we can observe the ever transforming geography of world literature. The relationship between Korean literature and world literature is not the problem of whether a text in Korean literature can become world literature or not, in which world literature operates as a criterion for judgment. World literature today is not yet a verified, fixed, and objective value or set of criteria, but is in the process of reconstruction. The two can be located as strictly related in the sense of offering each other the momentum, methodology, and perspective to rethink themselves. In this sense, the consciousness of marginal and reciprocal alteration, of the exquisite balance of maintaining the original text and simultaneously altering it, helps us question whether universal literary value can be maintained in the Others’ contexts and vice versa. The ultimate concern of what I call alteration is to maintain both universal and local contexts. We need to try to maintain a consciousness of the Others’ contexts which enables us to have a more just vision.

It is interesting to note that Korean writers, while importing the concept of “literature,” that was still obscure even in the West, ¹ were troubled by how it could be harmonized with the concept of “mun” (문) which includes all human intellectual activities in East Asia’s traditions, and their problem could not be resolved by reference to a clearly established concept of literature in the West. For instance, in the essay “What Is Literature?,” Yi Kwang-Su, reminding us of the fact that the term “literature” is a translated one in Korea and paying special attention to the aesthetic aspect of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Condition of “East Asia” Discourse: The Concept and Practice of De-homogenization
• 3. Porous Modernity: Overcoming Modernity in the Age of Globalization
• 4. The World of Circulation: The Universality of Literary Value in the Guunmong
• 5. The Literary Value of Sin Ch‘ae-Ho’s Dream Sky: A Marginal Alteration of Dante’s Comedy
• 6. National Language Beyond Nation-States: Cosmopolitan Vernacular Literary Language in Yi Kwang-Su
• 7. Literature as Sensibility to the Other: Dante in Modern Korean Literature
• Backmatter