한국중국소설학회 20년을 돌아보며

The 20-Year Retrospection of the Society for the Research in Chinese Novels

The Society for Research in Chinese Novels(韓國中國小說學會) celebrated its 20th anniversary. The establishment of the Society for Research in Chinese Novels means that a society dealing with various genres of Chinese literature was founded for the first time in Korea. Later, the Society for Research in Chinese Novels has been engaged in various activities, and the most important thing in the academic aspect is to publish an acadmic journal, The Journal for Research in Chinese Novels(中國小說論叢) and a newsletter, Newsletter for Research in Chinese Novels(中國小說硏究會報). For the last 20 years, the 30th edition of The Journal for Research in Chinese has been released, and the 78th issue of Newsletter for Research in Chinese Novels has been brought out. Marking its 20th anniversary, the society is confronting a lot of difficulties. First of all, the society should play a role as an academic criterion assessing the level of academic fields as well as its members. At the same time, it should contribute to academic research development by considering methods for a specific field and provoking an academic debate about its methodologies. However, looking back on the past, there are a lot of things to think about whether 'the novel society' has faithfully fulfilled its duty. In addition, there are problems in the operation of the society. For instance, the chairman of the society is still selected in a vague way or committees such as Administrative Committee and Editing Committee are not fully functioning. Finally, the society is not equipped with basic infrastructure due to its small size. The lack of its basic infrastructure has caused problems including sending and receiving various kinds of official documents and essential society history record like writing down minutes, and storage problems related to issuing “the journal” and “the newsletter” and then organizing and keeping the files. Also, in the aspect of human resources, it is important to develope editorial staff to publish new publications other than “the journal” and “the newsletter” by discovering and fostering the next generation interested in the academic world.