The Imagined Space-Time of Yang Ju-dong’s research on the Korean Classical Poetry and its Contexts of the ‘Korean Parnassus’ in the late Japanese Colonial Period of Korea (original) (raw)

2020, The Comments on the Korean Classical Texts

This paper analyzes Yang Ju-dong(1903~1977)’s research on the Korean classical poetry, focusing on its contexts of the ‘Korean Parnassus’ group in the late Japanese colonial period of Korea, from the late 1930s to the early 1940s. At the time of the second Sino-Japanese war, writers of “Munjang”, a popular coterie magazine founded in 1939, tried to ‘invent’ the language and literature of Joseon(Korea). Yang Ju-dong’s research on the Korean classical poetry, particularly interested in lexicology of ancient Korean language and literature, were related to such tendency of Munjang and its writers at that time. Concerning the discourse of ‘Korean classical literature’, Yang ju-dong conceived double boundaries of the Korean classical literature, the diachronic ‘past’ and the spatial ‘Korea=Orient.’ By fusing these concepts of time and space, he organized a singular ‘function’ of space-time of the Korean literature, that the Korean classical literature was valuable because it came from the past(classical antiquity), which meant it preserved Korean=Oriental aesthetics very well. These imagined boundaries and their function relied on two inventions. The first was the invention of the continuity of Korean language, from the language of Silla dynasty to the modern Korean. The second was the invention of the genealogical extension of Korean language toward Manchurian or Mongolian, based on the hypothesis of ‘Ural-Altaic language family.’ It seems that Yang ju-dong’s research internalized, to a certain degree, the logic of Japanese Imperialism, especially on its Orientalism or direction of ‘post/anti-westernization.’ To quote Homi Bhabha’s words, however, the invention of Yang ju-dong’s research can be analyzed as ‘resistance,’ because it interpellated Joseon(Korea), which was completely eliminated, into the Japanese imperialistic initiative of ‘Greater East Asia’, and therefore, implied “the signs of cultural difference and reimplicate them within the ‘deferential relations’ of colonial power.”