영문학과 주체적 연구:백낙청을 중심으로

Paik Nak-chung and Self-reliant Study of English Literature in Korea

Korean scholars of English literature have an ambivalent attitude toward Anglo-American literature and criticism, attraction and revulsion. They are strongly attracted to, and deeply influenced by the Anglo-American literary tradition to such a degree that they are in danger of losing their Korean identity. Then the question is how they regain their lost subjectivity and make their reading and writing differ from Anglo-American counterparts. Paik Nak-chung, whose self-imposed life-long task has been building Korean scholarship independent of Anglo-American tradition,proposed that our reading, which tends to be sympathetic to Anglo-American literature, should be assisted by its opposite, antipathy. He argued that it is necessary for us to cultivate such a dual reading practice of sympathy and antipathy, without which intellectual spirit of self-reliance cannot be achieved. He emphasized time and time again our reading should differ from Anglo-Americans’. In this paper I argue that such a dual strategy is too much reactive to guarantee our intellectual emancipation. Isn’t antipathy, as a reaction to sympathy, still fettered to its object of resistance, hence not yet overcoming the problematic of binary opposition of the Korean self and the other? What is more essential than our difference from Anglo-American others, is our difference of reading among Koreans. The demand for producing external difference should be replaced by the demand for internal difference.