식민지 시기 예술 개념 수용과 문학장의 변동; 일제 말기 최재서의 예술론과 정치의 미학화 = The Aestheticizing of Politics in Ch`oe Chaeso`s Modernist Realism

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This article analyzes Ch`oe Chaeso`s conception of art in his critical writings from the mid-1930s to 1945. During this period he was a leading figure in Korean literary criticism, and he veered from being a vehement advocate of modernist aesthetics to become a prominent theorist in the Kokumin Bungaku [National Literature] movement, which was a response to the colonial assimilation policy of the Japanese Governor-General. During his modernist era, which abruptly came to an end around 1938, Ch`oe developed his Chujijuui [Intellectualism] theory, which defines intelligence as the human faculty of being disengaged from any hermeneutic reduction of the complex reality of modern life, and remaining suspended in the midst of passive subjection to the phenomenon of the modern. What I call Modernist Realism is this monist aesthetics that locates reality and its artistic representation on one and the same plane. This aesthetics entails the dogma that artwork embodies art`s absolute alienation from reality, which Ch`oe himself demonstrated in his critical writings on the avant-garde works of Yi Sang. This monistic aesthetics becomes politicized in its treatment of the following oppositions: Reality vs. Artwork, Art vs. Criticism, and Theory vs. Reality. Thus, when modern man actively suspends himself in the in-between spaces of these polarities, he is deemed to be moral, which renders his action truly subjective. By adhering to this morality, he continues perpetually to question any form of aesthetics that separates the aesthetic from the real-political. In short, this approach to morality defines the context within which the question of how to aestheticize the political constantly recurs.