최재서의 엘리엇 읽기에 대한 몇 가지 단상

Fragmentary Thoughts on Jae-Sou Choi’s Reading of T. S. Eliot

This paper traces the trajectory of Jae-Sou Choi’s reading of T. S. Eliot from 1933 to 1942. Jae-Sou Choi, who studied English literature―particularly British Romanticism―at Keijo Imperial University, adopted the literary and critical discourses of Eliot (as well as those of T. E. Hulme, I. A. Richards, and Herbert Read) in his making of the theory of Intellectualism. Choi repeatedly referred to “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919) and “The Function of Criticism” (1923) along with “Poetry and Propaganda” (1930), The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933), After Strange Gods (1934) and “Catholicism and International Order” (1936) focusing on such concepts as tradition, ideal order, and outer authority. In doing so, he attempted to overcome what he thought were the limitations of Romanticism by emphasizing these concepts as distinguished from the Romantic ones of “personality” and “Inner Voice.” However, his reading of Eliot changed according to the degree of his involvement in the moral and political issues of literary criticism during the Japanese colonial period. Examining three different phases of Choi’s reading of Eliot, this paper not simply traces the changing phases but reveals how Choi merged the concepts into his later rhetorical strategies advocating the imperial ideology of the “new world order”―Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere―in the late 1930s and early 1940s.