Formation of Modern Literary Field: Intersection of Gender and Coloniality in Korean History.

Abstract

This dissertation begins with several questions regarding colonial modernity, gender and nationalism in colonial Korea. Why do some New Women, especially female writers, get memorialized as ideal models, and others do not? If gendered nationalism produced the model of an ideal women and suppressed and regulated women to fit that frame, where can we locate the subjectivity of New Women? Even though male nationalists seem so powerful when they construct and enforce a model for ideal women, is their power undermined by their own status as the colonized? In order to answer these sequential questions, this dissertation follows writers’ lives and their works in colonial Korea. The literary world, with its writers’ groups, was the place to practice modernity because, in the colonial context, the participation of Koreans in the economic and political realms was restricted. As a consequence, the literary realm became especially important, and it offers us a valuable opportunity for observing the discourse and behavior of these colonial subjects. Using the comparative method, I argue that gaining access to economic resources and maintaining favorable public opinion contribute to the success of female writers. Although both successful and unsuccessful female writers had several marriages, divorces, and love affairs, the more successful second generation of female writers use several strategies such as making politically expedient marriages, and publishing ideologically uncontroversial stories to maintain their popularity. In short, they learned the lessons of their first-generation predecessors. While male writers tried to control the behaviors of Korean New Women, they also attempted to overcome their own insecure position as the colonized by imagining Japanese women as their inferior. The literary world of colonial Korea, in the form of novels, newspaper and magazine articles, and barriers to publication, clearly reflects these struggles and conflicts. At the same time, the colonial writers contributed to the construction and practice of social norms. Examining these multi-layered conflicts and the construction of norms in the colonial context, this dissertation suggests that no single category or duality, whether male/female or colonizer/colonized, fully explains the colonial structure or the struggles that took place within it.