Dissident Readings: Paik Nak-Chung and the Politics of Engagement In
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Dissident Readings: Paik Nak-Chung and the Politics of Engagement in South Korean Literature by Susan S. Hwang A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Asian Languages and Cultures) in the University of Michigan 2016 Doctoral Committee: Associate Professor Youngju Ryu, Chair Associate Professor Christi A. Merrill Professor Xiaobing Tang Associate Professor Jonathan Zwicker © Susan S. Hwang, 2016 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation owes its completion to the unwavering support and guidance of many individuals who have, in their own way, left an indelible mark on this project as well as my life. Deep gratitude is due to my advisors in particular. I am especially indebted to Youngju Ryu, whose profound commitment to the ethics of literary scholarship continues to inspire me in immeasurable ways. Had it not been for her unfaltering faith in the project—against all odds, indeed—this dissertation would never have been made possible. From the incipient stages of research, her sharp comments and tremendous breadth of knowledge of Korea’s literary terrain have shaped this project beyond measure. I am also grateful to Christi Merrill, whose openness to new ideas and creative interpretation of texts have taught me to think outside the box. Her course on translating injustice across cultures, which I took during my first year at the University of Michigan, brought many meaningful questions to bear on this project. Xiaobing Tang taught me the importance of cultivating discipline as an academic writer, as well as the joy of close reading through his teaching and scholarship. Jonathan Zwicker has been a keen interlocutor, guiding me to see the project anew from a helpful distance when it was most needed. I am also grateful to all the other teachers and mentors, both at the University of Michigan and elsewhere, who have enriched my academic life in many ways: Juhn Ahn, Miranda Brown, Marcus Nornes, Nancy Florida, Anton Shammas, ii Kyongmi Park, Kim Sa-in, So Yǒnghyǒn, Song Eunyoung, Son Yugyǒng, Jun Yoo, Kyu Hyun Kim, Serk-bae Suh, and Ted Hughes. I have benefited from many institutions at various stages of research and writing. I would like to thank the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures for their support over the past eight years. I want to thank Ashlee Wolfe, Wendy Burr, and Kathryn Beeman, in particular, for pointing me to the right resources during the various stages of my graduate career. I owe a special debt of gratitude to the Nam Center for Korean Studies. Nojin Kwak, David Chung, Do-Hee Morsman, Adrienne Janney, and Jiyoung Lee provided me not only with generous financial support, but also a strong sense of close-knit community that made me feel right at home. I want to thank each and every one of them for their enthusiasm and support over the years. For sustaining me through the long journey of graduate school I would like to express my thanks to fellow students Ha Yeon Lee, Michael Prentice, Irhe Sohn, Minna Lee, Joo Young Lee, Yeon-ju Bae, Nora Hauk, Jaymin Kim, Martino Dibeltulo, Ignacio Villagran, Kevin Mulholland, Anna Johnson, Angie Baecker, Becky Bloom for their support and camaraderie. I also want to thank Mei-Chen Pan, Cassie Miura, Amanda Healy, and Kate Schnur for their excellent feedback and words of encouragement at a critical time in the dissertation writing process. For their humor, candor, and compassion from near and far, I thank Sharon Shinn, Heidi Un Kim, Seohee Chang, You-sun Crystal Chung, Lenny Ureña Valerio, Yan Long, and Carrick Rogers. Finally, I am ever grateful to my family for their unwavering support, patience, and love over the years. I thank my parents, in particular, for not only allowing me but encouraging me with all their heart through my journey along the road less taken. And for that, I owe them everything. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements …………………………………………………………………….ii Abstract ……………………………………………………………………………..v Introduction Practicing Dissidence in South Korean Literature ..……………………..1 Chapter 1 Specters of D.H. Lawrence: Paik Nak-chung and the Double Project of Modernity ……………………..……………………18 Chapter 2 Between Critique and Affirmation: the Problem of Minjung in Paik’s Reading of Pang Yǒngung’s The Story of Pun’ye (1967) ………64 Chapter 3 Theory as Praxis: The Division System within the Capitalist World-Economy ………………………………………………………108 Chapter 4 World Literature and Its Discontents: Shin Kyung-sook, Bae Suah, and the Price of Globalization ………………………………………...146 Conclusion Pursuing the Double Project of Modernity …………………………...187 Bibliography …………………………………………………………………………..195 iv ABSTRACT In the second half of the twentieth century, as the divided Korea became a stage for the Cold War, South Korea experienced military authoritarianism, democratization, globalization, and neoliberalization over five decades. Literature, far from being a mere witness to these transformations, became a privileged site of resistance and acute contestation. Central to this process was the work of Paik Nak-chung, a literary critic and public intellectual who launched South Korea’s leading progressive journal Ch’angjak kwa pip’yŏng in 1966 and remained at its helm until 2015, reinvigorating literature as a powerful means of engagement through the journal’s pages. This dissertation analyzes the work of Paik Nak-chung as a publisher and theorist, focusing on how active and translational practices of dissident reading led Paik to formulate the concepts of national literature, division system, the double project of modernity, and world literature that have dominated South Korean literary debates over the last half century. It explores the unique tensions and contradictions in Paik’s positions as a reader against the grain of conventional or canonical readings, and how Paik’s readings generated alternative modes of textual interpretation that became commentaries not only on the contemporary society, but also on the conventions of literary practice in Korea. Paik’s mode of dissidence is characterized as a perpetual balancing act between the conceptual limits of decolonization and modernization, between resistance against and co-optation by the state, between nation and the world, as well as between literature of autonomy and v autonomy of literature. By situating Paik’s readings in a broader post-Korean War intellectual history, this study proposes a framework for understanding literature’s conditions of possibility as a political practice within the local constraints of national division and under the global conditions of the Cold War. vi INTRODUCTION Practicing Dissidence in South Korean Literature In 1963, Paik Nak-chung was a twenty-five year old scholar of English literature who had just returned home from Ph.D. training at Harvard and joined the faculty of Seoul National University’s English Department. His success as a member of the academic establishment had been a foregone conclusion for some time, the path prepared by Paik’s storied command of the English language. As a high school boy, Paik had won a speech contest sponsored by New York Herald Tribune, and as a graduating senior at Brown, he had been selected to give a valedictory speech. The same newspapers that had covered these triumphs of the young “genius” now reported on Paik’s return to Korea with a Harvard feather on his cap. Born into privilege as a scion of a bourgeois family that made its fortune serving the Japanese colonial government, and groomed both by his own intelligence and his educational pedigree to continue in that privilege, Paik was poised for an elegant, if somewhat crusty, life of a college professor ensconced in an armchair and surrounded by tomes of Chaucer and Sterne. In the summer of 1965, however, Paik published a column in The Chosun Daily in protest of the arrest of writer Nam Chǒnghyǒn over the purported pro-Communist/anti- American leanings in his novel Punji [Land of Excrement] (1965). “In a society like ours,” Paik argued, “literature can grow only by taking on the role of speaking for the 1 resistance of the people.”1 The publication of the column resulted in Paik’s interrogation by the Korean Central Intelligence Agency for his “political activity” (chŏngch’i haengwi). Taking the authoritarian state’s distinction between literary and political activities, and subverting this distinction with a thoroughness that few critics could match, Paik thereafter embarked on a career of theorizing, analyzing, and indeed practicing literature as a political activity par excellence. This career would situate Paik at the heart of nearly every watershed moment in Korean history of the last half century, from the founding of the influential quarterly Ch’angjak kwa pip’yŏng [Creation and Criticism, hereafter Ch’angbi] in 1966 and the drafting of “The Statement for Restoration of Democracy” against Park Chung Hee’s Yusin Constitution in 1974, to the joint declaration of North and South Koreas in June of 2000.2 Paik’s career as a critic was defined by literature’s mobilization as political intervention against the state’s repressive, anti-democratic mechanisms. The multifaceted expansion of Paik’s career from an English professor to that of a theorist, editor, publisher, and an activist stands as a fascinating testament to the ways in which dissident intellectuals in South Korea arose as political subjects at pivotal moments in contemporary Korean history. As exemplified by the Punji incident in 1965, Paik was a key figure in enabling the expansion of literary practices by redefining the parameters of what is properly literary. The most notable example of this can be found in Paik’s establishment of the literary quarterly Ch’angbi in 1966. Ch’angbi’s inauguration brought about a 1 Paik Nak-chung, “Chŏhang munhak ŭi chŏnmang—chakka Nam Chŏnghyŏn ssi kusok sagŏn kwa kwallyŏn hayŏ” [The future of literature of resistance—regarding the arrest of the writer Nam Chŏnghyŏn], Chosun Ilbo, July 13, 1965.