Paper short abstract:

Examining the relationality between Yi Kwang-su, ‘the father of modern Korean literature’ and Japanese author Kunikida Doppo, this paper illuminates the complex transnational flow of knowledge at work at the very birth of modern Korean literature that goes beyond the dichotomy of East and West.

Paper long abstract:

Modernity in East Asia has largely been understood as the result of ‘translating the West’, a unidirectional flow of knowledge from West to non-West that eventually resulted in self-colonisation and/or reactionary cultural nationalism. In this knowledge transfer regime, Japan, the first East Asian country to modernise, played a role of the window into Western modernity for neighbouring countries.

Yi Kwang-su (1892–1950?), ‘the father of modern Korean literature’, was one of the first Korean students to study in Japan. He has been seen as a typical ‘self-colonised’ intellectual, for whom the West served as the ultimate source of authority. He also endeavoured to establish a national literature of Korea following a new Western conception which would reflect the greatness of nationhood. Indeed, his Mujeong (Heartless, 1917), widely recognized as the first modern Korean literature, has been known for its paean for civilizational progress and nationalism.

However, how do we square this understanding of Yi as a product of the Western impact (by way of Japan) with the fact that he was part of the Japanese-Russian transnational intellectual relations that promoted anarchist and revolutionary thought antithetical to the Western civilizational model of progress (‘civilization and enlightenment’)? Situating Yi in this massive intellectual phenomenon of what Sho Konishi and Olga Solovieva have recently called ‘Japan’s Russia’ helps to overturn the existing understanding of him, and, in turn, the figure of Yi enables us to see a triangulation of this circulation of knowledge between Japan and Russia. This paper pays particular attention to his relationality with Japanese author Kunikida Doppo which will cast a very different light on the first modern Korean novel Mujeong. Ultimately, it illuminates the complex and multi-directional nature of transnational flow of knowledge at work at the very birth of modern Korean literature that goes beyond the dichotomy of East and West altogether.