Sunyoung Park

realism national aesthetic the Sin`ganhoe woman and popular readership

Yŏm Sangsŏp is known as the greatest realist in the formative period of modern Korean literature, with his novel Samdae (Three Generations; 1931) celebrated as the masterpiece of colonial realism. This article investigates the ideological and institutional constitutions of Yŏm’s realist literature. My analysis of his critical essays relates his aesthetic principle of critical realism to his political affiliation with progressive nationalists, who sympathized with the socialist historical outlook and yet placed an emphasis on national liberation over class conflict. I argue that Yŏm espoused critical realism as a national aesthetic alternative both to the nativism of cultural nationalists and to the proletarian literature of socialist radicals during the Sin’ganhoe period (1927–1931). In my textual analysis, I approach Three Generations not as a faithful portrayal of a contemporary middle-class Korean family but as an allegorical narrative of the nation, in which Yŏm projected the status quo of divided nationalist camps according to his critical perspective. My reading of Three Generations as a patriarchal national narrative leaves a crowd of mostly female minor characters unaccounted for. By observing their correlation to the emerging urban reading public, I inquire into the constitutive influence of popular readership on the maturation of Yŏm’s realist writing style, which he first modeled after those of Western and Japanese novels.