Paper short abstract:

This paper analyzes the interactions between class, ethnicity, and genius in the reconfiguration of discourses about literary authorship and value in 1920s Japan, through the media debut as a proletarian writer of Chŏng Yŏn-gyu, the first Korean writer to publish in Japanese in the metropolis.

Paper long abstract:

The first decades of the 20th century were a key turning point in the formation of the modern Japanese literary field. The earlier model centered around coterie journals produced by and circulated among the intelligentsia gave way to a gradual professionalization of literary writing, and an expansion both of its readership and of the range of individuals who could try and make a career out of it. These changes were accompanied by new conceptualizations of literary authorship and value, now less tied to master-disciple genealogies and command of traditional techniques, and centered instead on new notions of individual creative “genius.” At the same time, the growth of proletarian literature brought new ideas about the political role of literature in society, and the source of the writer’s art. Ultimately what was at stake here was the question of who could produce literature, and why (and how) should their voice be valued.

I will analyze how these new ideas of authorship and value intersected with discourses around ethnicity, class, and individual genius through the example of the debut of Chŏng Yŏn-gyu (鄭然圭, 1899-1979) as a proletarian writer. Now relegated to little more than a footnote in most literary histories, in June 1922 Chŏng became the first Korean author to publish in the metropolis in Japanese, when his short story “Kessen no zen’ya” appeared in the anthology Geijutsu sensen: Shinkō bungaku 29nin-shū (ed. Nakanishi Inosuke). The following year Chŏng put out the novel Sasurai no sora and the short-story collection Sei no modae, and was discussed in the Japanese media as an “oppressed genius” leading “the life of a mountain hermit,” but whose work was at the same time the result of his native Korea’s “three-thousand years of despotism and tyranny.” By considering the many sides of Chŏng’s media-generated persona (as an eccentric unkempt artist, a diligent colonial subject, a passionate youthful leftist activist, etc.), my paper will shed light on the varied and sometimes contradictory discourses that negotiated and configured literary authorship, and the purported universality of “artistic genius” in 1920s Imperial Japan.