The Real Modern: Literary Modernism and the Crisis of Representation in Late Colonial Korea by Christopher P. Hanscom (review)

Painstakingly researched, Chris Hanscom’s The Real Modern: Literary Modernism and the Crisis of Representation in Late Colonial Korea offers a series of highly nuanced, original analyses of three major 1930s modernist Korean writers (Pak T’aewŏn, Kim Yujŏng, and Yi T’aejun). Hanscom’s book makes a most welcome addition to existing studies on Korean, Asian, and Western modernisms in a number of important ways. First, Hanscom demonstrates how existing South Korean literary histories have posited a divide between aesthetics and politics. This divide accompanies the opposition made between literary works associated with realism, particularly proletarian writing, and modernist texts of the 1930s, making up what has come to be called Korean modernism. Hanscom underscores the importance of literary form and the questioning of referentiality by the modernists, showing how Pak T’aewŏn, Kim Yujŏng, and Yi T’aejun—in differing yet intersecting ways—reveal and contest the discriminatory assimilationism undergirding Japanese policies in late colonial Korea. Second, Hanscom’s sophisticated approach to theories of language in 1930s colonial Korea offers a much needed situating of the richness and complexity of colonial Korean modernism within the broader crisis of representation confronted not just by the modernists but, in varying degrees, by all colonial Korean writers and intellectuals in this period. Hanscom’s book thus speaks beyond literary modernism to address the 1930s cultural scene as a whole. Third, Hanscom’s careful elaboration of the modernists’ critical response on the level of literary form and language to a colonial context locates Korean colonial modernist practice within the historical context of Japanese empire while allowing for an understanding of the innovation of the Korean modernists in the context of multiple, global modernisms. Through his multilayered account of the questioning of referentiality in the Korean case, Hanscom enables us to see how global modernisms should be approached not in terms of a Eurocentric, diffusionist model but as a set of creative, polycentric practices.

Each chapter of Hanscom’s book makes a significant intervention, giving us a new understanding of colonial modernity while offering important, incisive readings of key critical and literary texts associated with 1930s colonial Korean modernism. Chapter 1 provides an extremely helpful analytical overview of the 1930s literary scene. Through his comparison of the critical work of the leftist literary critic and poet Im Hwa, the modernist Kim Kirim, and the critic Ch’oe Chaesŏ, Hanscom shows how the 1930s crisis of representation works its way across major literary circles: Im Hwa’s gap between the ideal and real, Kim Kirim’s disjunction between Korean literature and its historical context, and Ch’oe Chaesŏ’s delineation of a subjective split give rise to a questioning of language and reference in general. Here, Hanscom is able to locate colonial Korean modernism in its historical context by demonstrating the ways in which this questioning of all reference and language also implicates the empirical/realist mode of colonial discourse.

Hanscom organizes chapters 2 through 7 in pairs, with one chapter on critical works by the writer in question or related to the writer’s literary project followed by a chapter on the writer’s literary texts. This pairing puts critical and literary works in dialogue with each other in a very productive way. Hanscom’s analysis of the critical works by and about the three writers sheds new light on the literary works he discusses while highlighting the importance of the literary texts to the broader discourse on modernism and colonial modernity itself.

Chapter 2 first traces the leftist critique of Pak T’aewŏn that has led to a “depoliticizing” of modernism stretching from the 1930s to recent South Korean literary histories. The chapter then examines literary critical work, including that by Pak T’aewŏn himself, on the language of modernism and its different modes of experimentation. Here, Hanscom delineates the ways...