Dissident Readings: Paik Nak-chung and Politics of Engagement in South Korean Literature.

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 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.