Cho Dong-Il

hanmun hyangga sijo kasa novel modern national literature

The common written language of East Asia, classical Chinese (hanmun), did not hinder the Korean ethnic language. With the impact of hanmun, it developed into a written language that had the capacity to express high culture. The civil service examination system that tested candidates’ ability in hanmun writing was a literary examination because literature was valued over practical types of knowledge in governing society. The first poetic genre using Korean ethnic language, hyangga, internalized the world by embodying the ideology of an age that placed importance only on the mind, but in an age when both the outer material world and the inner mind were considered important, it was necessary to create didactic poetry, kasa, which globalized the self and lyric poetry sijo that internalized the world. The most important social change of the transitional period from the medieval era to the modern era was the emergence of the bourgeoisie, which demanded a change from a status-based society to a class-based society. The new literature initiated by the bourgeoisie, namely, the novel (sosŏl), was a rebellious child; disguising itself as biography, it destroyed earlier authoritative ways of thinking. Following the same process, East Asian countries created different products. The novels of China were writers’ novels, while the novels of Japan were publishers’ novels, and the novels of Korea were readers’ novels. Modern literature was born through overcoming two unfavorable conditions. As Western literature was introduced second-hand by the Japanese, the tradition of Korean literature offered a wellspring from which to create a modern national literature that may be considered a desirable model for the Third World. Indirect methods such as allusion, symbolism, and satire were all used with good effect as a way of coping with Japanese military rule that denied freedom of the press or of thought, as well as criticizing colonial rule and expressing the desire for national liberation.