Science and Literature in Korea: An Introduction
- Science and Literature in Korea:An Introduction
In one of the climactic scenes of the 1917 serial novel Heartless, protagonist Yi Hyŏngsik exhorts his fellow travelers to go abroad, study, and return to strengthen the incipient Korean nation with their knowledge.
"Science! Science!" Hyŏngsik exclaimed to himself when he returned to the inn and sat down. The three young women looked at Hyŏngsik.
"We must first of all give the Korean people science. We must give them knowledge." He stood up clenching his fists, and walked about the room.1
Commonly referred to as the first modern novel in Korean literary history, Yi Kwangsu's Heartless culminates—in terms of plot trajectory, character development, and message—in a declaration of the importance of science to the modernization of Korea. As Jongyon Hwang points out in this issue, Yi's championing of science "earned sympathy from the majority of reformers and educators captured [End Page 213] by the Western notion of civilization." While the novel does not make clear what exactly Hyŏngsik meant by science, it seems to have stood as a general category encompassing multiple disciplines that, as part of the enlightenment education advocated by Korea's early twentieth-century elite, would reform and modernize Korea.
As Yi made clear, however, science was only part of the curriculum necessary to awaken what he considered to be Korea's sleeping multitudes. Arguably as important was the central role literature would play in the development of the modern nation. In his critical essay "The Value of Literature," Yi articulated the connections between science and literature. While he declared science to be the successor to the premodern category of "knowledge" (hangmun), he elevated literature to the position of science's equal because of its unique ability to express the emotion of the emerging modern subject. "Just as science, the fruit of human intelligence, is indispensable to our life, so is literature," Yi wrote in 1910, the year of Korea's annexation by Japan. He continued, "It is destined to live so long as our feelings and emotions remain intact."2
At the same time, Yi viewed literature as a way not only to express emotion but also to stimulate it as a means of cultivating modern national subject-identities. "In science," Yi wrote in 1916, "we objectively examine the material aspect of things, but literature evokes feelings of beauty, ugliness, happiness and sadness, all of which make us feel that we are reading the depths of our own minds. . . . In literature, we do not study things; rather, we feel them."3 Here, Yi demonstrated a shared investment among early twentieth-century Korean writers in the exploration of the private, interior spaces of the heart as sites where social interactions and their authentic responses reveal themselves. "Science addresses our intellects, whereas literature fulfills our emotion,"4 he wrote in a statement that both affirmed the Cartesian split of body and mind and hinted at the nationalizing potential of emotion.
This is not to suggest that either science or literature began with the inception of the colonial modern; nor was Yi's articulation of the relationship between science and literature necessarily definitive. What is significant is how literature—in its function as that which both reveals and constitutes the modern national subject—enters into a dialectical relationship with science as an objective exercise of knowledge about the material world. Yi's insight captured in the above quote ("In science we objectively examine . . . but literature evokes feelings . . . ") signals an important moment in the development of literary politics on the peninsula, when "modern" literature and science staked competing claims over which of the two could best provide access to experience and knowledge of the world.
The term science (kwahak), as Kim Sŏnggŭn points out, comes from the phrase, "kwagŏ chi hak"—to study for the civil service examinations in premodern East Asia.5 The neologism was first coined in Meiji Japan, when it meant something closer to the nineteenth-century sense of Wissenschaft as "all academic knowledge (the natural and social sciences as well as the humanities)."6 As Kim observes, at the...
