Chosŏn p'yŏngmin munhaksa 朝鮮平民文學史 [History of Commoners' Literature in Chosŏn] / by Ku Cha-gyun Sŏul: Munjosa, 1948.

Chosŏn p'yŏngmin munhaksa, published in 1948, is a study of the development of classical Chinese literature by socially underprivileged writers, who did not belong to the hereditary elite yangban status during the Chosŏn dynasty (1392-1910). The term "commoner" in the title is used broadly, in opposition to the nobles, rather than as referring to a specific social status group. The book is a revised publication of the author Ku Cha-gyun's undergraduate thesis for Keijo Imperial University during the Japanese colonial rule. Despite the title, Ku's study focuses on introducing the key poets with brief biographical information. Even with such a limitation, Ku's study was one of the first scholarly efforts to engage social history in the literary studies in Korea. The book's most seminal contribution is in its historicization of the development of classical Chinese literature by poets who belonged to the underprivileged social status groups, from the fifteenth century through the end of the nineteenth century. The book is organized into three parts, with each part devoted to a discussion of the formation of the secondary social status groups in Chosŏn (Part 1), a theorization of the commoners' literature (Part 2), and an introduction to individual poets in five distinct periods during the Chosŏn dynasty (Part 3), respectively. Ku's study was particularly influential in inspiring the scholarship on literature by the late Chosŏn secondary status groups in the late 1970s and 1980s in South Korea.
Jiwon Shin (University of California, Berkeley)

Hong Kil-tong chŏn 洪吉童傳 [Tale of Hong Kil-tong] / by Pak T‘ae-wŏn, Sŏul: Chosŏn Kŭmnyung Chohap Yŏnhaphoe, 1947.

Just years before Pak T‘ae-wŏn became known in South Korea as a "writer who left for North Korea," he wrote his own adaptation of the classic Tale of Hong Kil-tong (Hong Kil-tong chŏn), a work often attributed to Hŏ Kyun (1569–1618). The character Hong Kil-tong has magical powers and leads a band of robbers to take from the rich to give to the poor. In the case of Pak T‘ae-wŏn's Tale of Hong Kil-tong, Pak shifts the time period of the story, plays down Kil-tong's individual heroism, and emphasizes the collective work of Kil-tong's band to defeat corrupt and oppressive government officials. This is a rare 1947 first edition of this book and is difficult to find as a modern reprint. The only other copy of this book I could find is a facsimile made in 1988 of the second edition from 1949. The first edition is easier to read, since the type is not as smudged as it is in the second edition.
Leif Olsen (University of British Columbia)

Suho chŏn 水滸傳 [Water margin] / by Pak T‘ae-wŏn Sŏul: Chŏngŭmsa, 1948.

In 1948, Pak T‘ae-wŏn made an adaptation of this well-known Chinese novel, Water Margin (Shuihu zhuan). Pak's younger brother, Pak Mun-wŏn, designed the book cover, while the title on the cover is in the handwriting of Pae Chŏng-guk. Pak Mun-wŏn studied art in Japan, and around 1950 he met his older brother T‘ae-wŏn, sister Kyŏng-wŏn, and niece Sŏr-yŏng (T‘ae-wŏn's daughter) in P‘yŏngyang.
Leif Olsen (University of British Columbia)

Chungdŭng munbŏm 中等文範 [An intermediate reader] / ed. by Pak T‘ae-wŏn Sŏul: Chŏngŭmsa, 1946.

Pak T‘ae-wŏn edited a literary reader for students called An Intermediate Reader (Chungdŭng munbŏm) in 1946, which includes a diverse array of writers. The authors represented in the anthology include Ch‘ae Man-sik (1902–50), Chŏng Hyŏn-ung (1911–76), Mo Yun-suk (1910–90), No Ch‘ŏn-myŏng (1912–57), Pak T‘ae-wŏn (1910–86), Yi Hyosŏk (1907–42), and others. Pak was ahead of his time for including both Mo and No in his anthology and for not labeling them separately under the derogatory category yŏryu chakka 女流作家 (authoresses).
Leif Olsen (University of British Columbia)

Changsam yisa 張三李四 [Three Changs and four Yis] / by Ch'oe Myŏng-ik, Sŏul: Uryŭ Munhwasa, 1947.

Kil Chin-sop's enigmatic title page illustration appears to show a landscape squashed between a row of telegraph poles and a paved road disappearing around a bend, whiled a bobbed female figure stands thoughtfully in the middle. It is a form mirrored by the parallel lines that stretch down the front cover, passing through its title, highlighted in red. Changsam yisa - or three Changs and four Yis - is a phrase that might best be translated 'ordinary people' for its English equivalent of 'every Tom, Dick or Harry' distracts from the extremely detailed description of 1930s Pyongyang that appears within this book's pages. Despite the title, Ch'oe's characters often seem anything but ordinary: former revolutionaries committing suicide in Harbin, lonely clerks sat at their desks having visions of Nietzche striking his own head with a rock, passengers on ominous train journeys encountering violent traffickers in women. Perhaps the parallel lines suggest the forboding sense of claustrophobia which characterises his descriptions of intellectuals in the midst of a cityscape being torn apart quite literally by industrial development. Many of Ch'oe contemporaries considered him to have best captured the malaise of the intellectual class during the latter years of Japanese occupation. After liberation, Ch'oe remained in his native Pyongyang and published six of his short stories in this collection. It remains the best and only collection of his works available outside the DPRK and a remarkable comment upon the condition of late colonial society.
Janet Poole (University of Toronto)

Haebang munhak sŏnjip 解放文學選集 [Selected Stories of Liberation Literature] / by Yŏm Sang-sŏp et al. Sŏul: Chongno Sŏwŏn, 1948.

Containing stories by writers such as Ch'ae Man-sik, Yi T'ae-jun, Yŏm Sang-sŏp, and Kim Tong-ni, Selected Stories of Liberation Literature represents arguably the most important anthology to appear in the Liberation Space. Most of the stories in the collection have become canonical works, all of them dealing with issues central to the shift from Japanese colonial rule to an emerging Cold War order. Ch'ae Man-sik's "Tale of a Rice Paddy" offers a colonial history of property, possession, and legality—critical issues in the Liberation Space, particularly given the land reform taking place in the North. The protagonist, who earlier lost his land to a Japanese speculator, insists that the August 15 "liberation" is meaningless unless his property is returned. Yŏm Sang-sŏp's "The Western Cookie Box," also deals with the redistribution of former Japanese possessions. Yŏm's work, which anticipates many of the themes that would become important in the "camptown literature" dealing with life outside US military bases in South Korea, offers a particularly interesting portrayal of the code-switching from Japanese rule to US hegemony, one the text links to the emergence of English as language of power and prestige. In his "Liberation: Before and After," Yi T'ae-jun, a writer associated with 1930s modernism who would shortly leave the South for the North and leftist literature, details another colonial history, this one a movement from the premodern Confucian world of the Chosŏn Dynasty represented in the text by Master Kim, a Confucian scholar who has remained "clean," pure throughout the colonial period by withdrawing to the countryside. The text moves through the imperialization during the Greater East Asian War (seen in what the text calls the "fascist" scene played out in a convocation of imperialized, Japanese-speaking and Japanese-clothed writers mobilized from different parts of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere to organize the imperial literature movement - kungmin munhak), and, finally, to the immediate post-liberation period in the South, where the United States Military Government brings nothing but political repression and the beginnings of a crony capitalism, allowing profiteers and Japanese collaborators to flourish. In "Cave Dwellers," Kim Tong-ni, the leading advocate of "pure literature," takes a different tack, figuring the dispossessed - refugees returned to Korea from the outer reaches of the Japanese empire who find temporary shelter in air-raid bunkers dug during the Greater East Asia War - as locus both of ethnonational authenticity and elemental humanity. The reworking of a wartime bunker as postcolonial living space, site of spontaneous mutual aid, points to the recovery of a communality that is at once national and primal (the bunker is closely associated in the text with mothers). Here, "ideology" (sasang) becomes an artificial imposition from the outside: the new home is only secured by the expulsion of a cave-dweller imbued with what the text portrays as half-baked leftist ideas (read erasure of the North).
Theodore Hughes (Columbia University)

Ssoryŏn kihaeng 蘇聯紀行 [Travels in the Soviet Union] / by Yi T'ae-jun Kyŏngsŏng : Cho-Sso Munhwa Hyŏphoe, Chosŏn Munhakka Tongmaeng, 1947.

Yi T'ae-jun's Travels in the Soviet Union is structured by temporality (past, present, future) linked to space, China ("spiritural past"), Chosŏn (present), and the Soviet Union (vanguard pointing to proper socialist future). Travels in the Soviet Union offers us a different form of internationalism than early 1930s KAPF texts, which privilege the laboring body as subject over ethnonational identification. Yi T'ae-jun's celebration of the Soviet Union occurs precisely because of its allowing of mulilayered identities. What Yi T'ae-jun, the 1930s modernist turned proletarian, locates in his trip to the Soviet Union is a socialist multiculturalism, the separation out of the economic from the cultural: in the text, the Soviet Union allows for the autonomy of national cultures and is thus non-assimilatory. It is precisely for this reason that the text rests upon the parallel description of socialist policies implemented in different regions (the ways in which these policies will produce an economic and political assimilation approaching the normative socialism existing in Russia) and the marking of ethnic cultural difference in the different regions. The text remaps Chosŏn in relation to Moscow as socialist center while invoking a national and cultural sovereignty of place.
Theodore Hughes (Columbia University)

Pul 불 [Fire] / by An Hoe-nam Sŏul: Uryŭ Munhwasa, 1947.

"Fire," the title story of An Hoe-nam's important short story collection, turns upon an identification with the working class that can only proceed by dismantling the public/private split. "Fire" follows the first-person narrator's coming-to-awareness of his own bourgeois possessiveness by way of his interaction with Mr. Lee, a farmer who returns home after Liberation from forced service as a laborer in the South Pacific only to find that his wife has left him and his means of making a living have disappeared. The narrator, a writer, and Mr. Lee participate in the purifying pullori (fire play) of farmers burning brush to rid the fields of insects, an act associated with removing the old and starting anew. The sense of communality produced by participation in this postliberation pullori assumes a more specific meaning (a move from traditionalist to class-based identity) when Mr. Lee later sets fire to his own home and drops out of sight, an act of cleansing that causes the narrator to reflect upon his own attachment to his home as space representative both of his bourgeois position and his former status as an I-novelist. Later, the narrator runs across Mr. Lee, who tells him that he has burned down his home for the sake of beginning a new and different life in Chosŏn: the destruction of the home in the text signals a break the feudal relations maintained under colonialism, as well as the realignment from I-novelist, narrator of domestic, private space, to socialist realist, chronicler of a masculinist revolutionary temporality. "Fire," then, can be thought of as a version of the "counter recantation narratives," declarations of purpose staking out positions for writers compromised in the late colonial period.
Theodore Hughes (Columbia University)

Samp'alsŏn 三八線 [Thirty-eighth Parallel] /by Yŏm Sang-sŏp Sŏul: Kŭmnyŏng Tosŏ, 1948.

Yŏm's Thirty-eighth Parallel takes the form of a travelogue, following the movement of a family moving through the North as they return to their home in the South from Manchuria following Liberation. It is the gaze of the narrator, the movement of his family through the landscape, that produces the North as an "outside" even as the text calls into question the imposition of abstract space, the space demarcated by the thirty-eighth parallel. The text closes with the family's finally making its way home to the South, crossing the thirty-eighth parallel, only to meet with a US soldier. While the North has become a foreign country, the South thus confronts its own crisis of legitimacy.
Theodore Hughes (Columbia University)

Sŏl Chŏng-sik (설정식, 薛貞植, 1912-1953) and his poetry

Sŏl was born on September 18, 1912 in Tanchŏn, South Hamgyŏng Province. He graduated from the department of Liberal Arts at Yŏnhŭi Junior College, and went on to major in English literature at Mount Union College in Ohio and at Columbia University. In 1932 he published "Songs Heard on the Street" (Kŏri esŏ tŭllyŏjunŭn norae) in the journal Light of the East (Tonggwang), but wrote most of his poems following the liberation. He served as a bureau chief in the Ministry of Information of the US Military Government in Korea, but later participated in the Chosŏn Writers' Alliance and voluntarily entered the North Korean People's Army and remained in North Korea. At the armistice talks he served as an interpreter for the North, but it is believed that he was executed in 1953 during the purge of former members of the South Korean Labor Party.

Immediately upon liberation, Sŏl published three volumes of poetry, Bell (Chong), Grapes (P'odo), and The Wrath of the Gods (Chesin ŭi punno), as well as a novel titled The Prime of Youth (Ch'ŏngch'un). Following the publication of this collection, and with the increasing oppressiveness of the Communist Party, he immersed himself in the study of Shakespeare, translated Hamlet, and published studies such as "A Note Concerning Hamlet."

In Sŏl's poetry the political task of forming a Korean nation-state in the aftermath of liberation occupies a central position. He clearly depicts national consciousness as a primary poetic concept, above which no other can stand: "On this road/ which we have no choice but to follow/ the entire world bent upon our torture/ though blood and flesh may flow and be rent/ though all breath may succumb like an insect/ until we establish sovereignty."

Following this, in a series of poems titled "Sunflower" (Haebaragi), he developed a richer and more complex voice. In these poems he celebrates the sun as the source of light and life; the sun is both a celestial body and the symbol of a new history. In the collection Bell (Chong), he attains a more sophisticated plane of symbolism, from which he expresses a deeper and more nuanced national consciousness: it is at this point that the subjective self overflows with a sense of a historical call to duty.
Kwŏn Yŏng-min (Seoul National University)

Chong 鐘 [Bell] / by Sŏl Chŏng-sik
Sŏul: Paegyangdang, 1947.

Published on April 1, 1947 by Paegyangdang, Sŏl Chŏng-sik's first collection of poems is divided into four parts and includes twenty-eight poems, in addition to "That High Hill After Light Has Been Lost" (Pit ŭl ilko kŭ tŭnopŭn ŏndŏk ŭl), and an excerpt from his novel The Prime of Youth (Ch'ŏngch'un). Part one consists of ten poems including "Bell" (Chong), the title work of this collection. Part two contains five including "The Soul" (Yŏnghon). Part three contains thirteen poems including three works in "Sunflowers" (Haebaragi), a serial poem, and two works in "The Sea" (Pada), another serial poem. Part four includes twenty-four poems in addition to "That High Hill After Light Has Been Lost." Among them, works such as "A Poem" (Si), "The Graveyard" (Myoji), "A Spring" (Saemmul) and "Autumn" (Kaŭl), all from Part two, were written in the 1930's under Japanese rule and the remaining twenty-four were written following Korea's liberation from Japan in 1945.

The four poems in this collection, written by Sŏl Chŏng-sik during the colonial era, are short, simple, and unpretentious pieces composed of six to twelve lines. They contain a more consistent diction and stronger images than Sŏl's post-liberation poems. Most of the works written after the liberation are structured on the monologue of a subjective voice and neglect to represent fully poetic objects in his own work. In these poems, vivid images of the sun and of sunflowers appear side by side with abstractions, such as "the people" and "the nation." In a typical lyric, we read: "The beautiful August sun/ Rose once and, on the wise bosom of the nation,/ Imprinted a round, burning record."

The most representative piece in this collection is "Bell" (Chong). In this poem a bell is fated to stay awake all through the night; its moaning at the hands of violence and its ceaseless ringing conceal the quiet endurance and fortitude of the Korean people. The final part of the poem reads:

"The nation will remain even after I am gone,/ So await self-ringing liberty,/ But moans will be heard even after I am gone,/ So silently ring your time-telling bell strikes at dawn."
These lines exemplify the poet's conviction that the nation and the people represent the most precious of values.
Kwŏn Yŏng-min (Seoul National University)

Podo 葡萄 [Grapes] / by Sŏl Chŏng-sik
Sŏul: Chŏngŭmsa, 1948.

Published in January 1948 by Chŏngŭmsa, this second poetry collection by Sŏl Chŏng-sik is divided into four parts, the last of which contains "Your Overflowing Generation" (Pŏmram hanŭn nŏhŭidŭl ŭi sedae), an excerpt from his novel The Prime of Youth. Sixteen in all, the poems here were written in 1947. The volume includes the works "Letter of Dedication," "Even the Sun Remains at the Zenith" (T'aeyangdo ch'ŏnsim e mŏmullŏ), "The Inverse of an Absolute That Does Not Allow For Laughter" (Silso to hŏrakchi annŭn chŏltae ŭi yŏk), "Grapes" and "A Eulogy" (Songga).

In 1947, the year most of the poems in the collection were composed, Sŏl Chŏng-sik was occupied with the establishment of the sovereignty of the "People's Republic" "(Hŏnsa)", in opposition to the USAMGIK (US Army Military Government in Korea). His involvement and the mentality of his fellow agitators are memorably portrayed in poems such as "Grapes" "Sangmang" and "A Eulogy".

At one point in Grapes he wonders, "Even if the land be unchanged, will the immature grapes/ indeed be safe tonight?" Grapes are the fragile fragments of nature in an age of white terror. Sŏl, an English literature major, was most likely influenced by Steinbeck when he chose to use the image of grapes as the centerpiece to the collection. They may, then, be read as symbols of the bodies and souls of the progressivists of his day, enraged at the hollow reality and disappointments of post-Liberation Korea.
Kwŏn Yŏng-min (Seoul National University)

	Please direct comments and corrections to : Hyokyoung Yi, Korean Studies Librarian 336 Gowen Hall Box 353527 University of Washington Libraries Seattle, WA 98195-3527 Phone: 206-543-6603 | Fax: 206-221-5298 E-mail: hkyi@u.washington.edu