Figuring Korean Futures: Children's Literature in Modern Korea by Dafna Zur (review)

Tongsim is a Korean word which is a "combination of the character tong for child and sim for heart/mind" (6). The concept of tongsim, or the child-heart as Dafna Zur translated, has been recognized as the most essential element of children's literature for most Koreans for a century. Even though the interpretation and the application of the concept slightly varies by scholars and writers, no one can deny the natural and tight connection between Korean children's literature and the concept of the child-heart. With Figuring Korean Futures: Children's Literature in Modern Korea, Dafna Zur focuses on this relationship. As in the title of the book, "Figuring Korean Futures," Zur pays special attention to the point that the figure of the child was recognized as the future and hope of the nation during the colonial and postcolonial periods of Korea. She insists the concept of the child-heart—the perspective on children as pure and innocent beings untouched by the burden from the past—worked as a driving force among intellectuals and writers to dream about a brighter future even in the darkest hours. Based on the idea that texts and images in the children's magazines exhibit the desire for modernization and nation-building, Zur traces children's periodicals published between 1908, when the first magazine for youth appeared, and 1950, when the Korean War broke out.

The introduction to Figuring Korean Futures, "The Child and Modern Korea," explains the historical, political, and social background of the emergence of child-heart and its relationship with Korean children's literature. Indicating that the term child-heart has been used indiscriminately so far and thus obscured the meaning of children to different interest groups in different periods, Zur argues that she intends to "flesh out this term and trace its political and social contours" through this book (6).

Chapter 1, "The Youth Magazine in Early Colonial Korea," begins with introducing two literary figures who had great influence on the history of Korean literature in the early twentieth century—Ch'oe Nam-sŏn and Yi Kwang-su. Zur mentions that both Ch'oe and Yi "saw youth as the only group capable of carrying Korea forward into a new future" (32). She indicates the purpose of Ch'oe's first magazine, Sonyŏn, which was first published in 1908, was to educate and reform Korea's youth, most of whom were still illiterate and had no reading materials for pleasure. By thoroughly analyzing texts and images from Sonyŏn, Zur demonstrates how this magazine pursued delivering modern knowledge to Korean youth and encouraging them to build a spatial sense of nation. Her keen analysis also points out that the adventure and development of Korean youth were only encouraged within the boundaries of a Japanese colonial framework. Zur argues that despite its contribution to Korean children's literature by providing pleasure reading materials for youth, Sonyŏn did not confront the important question of what it means to be young people in a politically unstable country that was on the verge of colonization.

In explaining these intellectuals' longing for Korea's modernization in the early twentieth century, Zur refers to Yi's manifesto, "On the Centrality of Children," which severely criticized Korea's old tradition, even to say "Let us feast on our parent's blood … and destroy the graves of the ancestors" (45). While reading this chapter, I was quite bewildered, because there was no mention that Yi's manifesto was extremely controversial at that time. Zur also neglects to reveal that Ch'oe and Yi were notorious pro-Japanese collaborators. Even though the two intellectuals were Korean independence activists in the beginning, they later changed their minds and became enthusiastic supporters of Japanese rule. They encouraged Korean youth to volunteer for the Imperial Army and extolled the greatness of the Japanese emperor when they were still influential literary authorities. Absence of this information is particularly noticeable given...