1920's literary world in Korea was in a stir, in a word, of the disintegration of sensibility. Such contradictory slogans, let's say, as "art for art's sake" or "art for life's sake" may suggest it. If Hoe Wol who was one of the aesthetics from the Ba...
1920's literary world in Korea was in a stir, in a word, of the disintegration of sensibility. Such contradictory slogans, let's say, as "art for art's sake" or "art for life's sake" may suggest it. If Hoe Wol who was one of the aesthetics from the Baik Jo's associates had taken Marxism as his strategy against this disintegration-which was generally accepted as the limitation of his contemporary literature-it was even impossible for him to get any satisfiable answers from it. As clearly shown in the expression "what you've got is an ideology but what you've lost art itself", it is because the literary theory of Marxim emphasized only the importance of deology and as this result, ended up in elimination of "art". It is here that he finally seceded from KAPF and started to search for the third direction in the world of literature.
In this respect he will be marked in the hisory of Korean literature as a type of literary person who had tried to overcome the problems of his art, his life and his world's view in terms of a comprehensive thought but failed without any achievement. His thesis (the theory and practice of literature) is to be noticed as a work which foreshadowed an agony or conflict of a certain age of literary history as well as his self reflection on this subject.