근대라는 기원, 시를 사유하는 방식 - '문명'에서 '문화'로 -

Modernity as an Origin, A Way to cogitate over Poetry - From 'Civilisation' to 'Culture'

The purpose of this article is to shed light on the formulating process of what we regard as modern poetry by looking into how the literary debate in the 1910s was related to the discourses on civilization and culture. The discourse on civilization pertains to the progress of material, politics, economy, society, and religion, while that on culture focuses on the characteristics of each nation reflected in such aspects as psyche, inner life, and cultivation. In the course of their being introduced into Japan after the Meiji Restoration, these two prominent courses of debate came to incorporate an East Asian point of view based on nationalism. Therefore, in researching into what could be the characteristics of modern literature in East Asia, it becomes an important premise to study the relationship between what the co-called neo-intellectuals thought of as a modern country and the Japanese reception of the discourses on civilization and culture. It is a known fact that the literature in those days is generally characterized by a literary view based on the function of enlightenment, which deviates from the notion of 'mun'. But the loss of sovereignty in 1910 served as a chance for the concept of a modern country based on such a view to be replaced by nation, spirit, or tradition. What is particularly notable here is that the literary view of the 1910s, which can be understood as a notion of literature based on 'jeong,' and the trends of pursuing lyric poetry after the 1910s are seen as connected with the culturalism, or internalized nationalism before the 1910s. Efforts to configure the scope of literature on the level of 'enlightenment' in the 1900s, which accelerated the beginning of the modern era, gave way to autonomous views of literature resulted from realizing the importance of individuals and inner life. In the process, the literary views of the 1900s had to go through twists and turns like deprivation of sovereignty and institutionalization of the notion of a nation. Whereas the so-called orthodox literature based on the discourse on civilization is summarized into a single purpose of pursuing a modern country as a substance, the discourse on culture, being combined with the aspect of aesthetic modernity represented by an expansion of literary autonomy, creates a more profound landscape of literature.