문학의 지방화와 탈식민주의

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Deep in the conception of `area literature` the negative sense of local literature permeates, and this very fact shows that true area literature may stand up only by overcoming and dissolving it. In this sense, it can be rightly claimed that our local literature be substituted by a renewed area literature. It is postcolonial discourse, I believe, that can answer this claim and offer a working alternative. Postcolonial theories share a denial of the center-oriented attitudes, and have recently brought a radical shift of perspectives in various areas such as philosophy. fine arts, politics, society, and economics, etc. And they also cast strong doubts on the absoluteness and the utility of the very notion of `the center`, and turns our attention onto the significance of the tiny voices that had been scattered around the periphery. To ease the tension between central and local literatures requires a paradigm shift which may do justice to locating their right places. To do this, it is above all necessary to dig out ethnocentric discourses of our own which may better fit our concrete reality and to canonize them rather than those grown out of Western traditions. In addition, more active studies on area literature should be put on their own right track. That is, elaborate analyses are required for the works that put indigenous modes of life into their own language. Kisook Song`s literature is an excellent example. It pursues after anti-imperialism and anti-feudalism that had served as core ideologies for a hundred years or so ever since Donghak people`s uprising in 1894, and his works were rooted through and through in the livings of Chollado peasants. Area literature provides us with the basis of literary variety which is one of the major goals for the inquirers of the contemporary Korean literature today. The overcoming the center-oriented attitudes in literature and the construction of multi-layered literary network, as I argue in this paper, may find their ways only through the appropriate understanding of the very nature of area literature. The construction of the foundation for the twenty-first century Korean literature as well as the renewal of our literature will be made possible thereof.