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Localized Globality in Colonial Korean Literature: Ch’angjo as
part of the ‘Little Magazine’ Movement
by
Jessica Marie Morgan-Brown
A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements
for the degree of Master of Arts
Department of East Asian Studies
University of Toronto
© Copyright by Jessica Marie Morgan-Brown 2020
ii
Localized Globality in Colonial Korean Literature: Ch’angjo as part of
the ‘Little Magazine’ Movement
Jessica Marie Morgan-Brown
Master of Arts
Department of East Asian Studies
University of Toronto
2020
Abstract
This thesis analyzes the Korean literary coterie magazine Ch’angjo (1919-1921) as part of
the global little magazine movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The analysis is
conducted on three different levels of increasing depth: the material, the linguistic, and the
literary semantic. Through these levels of analysis, it becomes clear that while the writers of the
Ch’angjo coterie were aware of and utilizing many Western literary forms and ideologies in their
writing, it was with the overarching aim of elevating their own national literature to be on par
with the global literature they encountered while studying in Japan. These forms and ideas were
translated into the Korean literary context, not with an aim to make Korean literature emulate the
Western, but rather to indigenize these forms within a wholly Korean context. The results of
these experimentations helped form the foundations of modern Korean literature.
iii
Acknowledgments
I would like to acknowledge the invaluable help of professors, friends, and mentors in
helping me to complete this thesis. Most especially I want to thank Prof. Janet Poole, for
believing that this was a worthwhile project and having the confidence in me that I could
complete it. Thank you for pointing me towards all of the right resources and valuable reading
materials that helped to create the framework of this thesis, as well as giving me countless notes
along the way. My interest in colonial Korean literature was inspired by you and this thesis
would not have been possible without your guidance.
I would also like to acknowledge Prof. Meng Yue, whose course on the cultural and
historic studies of modern China inspired my interest in literary magazines as a site of revolution.
Furthermore, I need to thank all of my classmates from this course for putting up with a non-
China scholar and patiently explaining to me the many things I didn’t know, my understanding is
much deeper thanks to all of you.
A special thanks is due to Hyun Kyung Lee who helped me navigate the complex visitor
system of Seoul National University’s central library. Thanks to your phone calls and
encouragement, along with the begrudging help of a security guard, I was able to gain access to
the SNU’s stacks and consequently copies of each issue of Ch’angjo, without which this thesis
would have been impossible. Also, many thanks to Dr. Ka Yan Danise Mok, who interpreted all
of the half-legible Sino-Korean characters that my untrained eyes couldn’t decipher. You saved
me hours of time and countless headaches.
I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge and thank my idea sounding board, Sophie
Bowman, Aliju Kim, Sungsoo Lee, and Yehji Jeong, for their invaluable advice and for
answering all of my seemingly random, completely out of context questions. Thanks for boosting
my self-confidence and making up for the limitations of my own mind with your knowledge and
experience. I would also like to thank my friend and tutor Hyein. You’re the reason my Korean
skills didn’t completely stagnate when life forced me out of school. You’ve been through so
much, and you’ve helped me through so much. I know I am your 언니 but I feel like in the
school of life, you are my 선배.
Most especially, I would like to thank Garett Brown. You know what you did, and I
couldn’t have done this without you.
iv
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments.......................................................................................................................... iii
Table of Contents ........................................................................................................................... iv
List of Figures ..................................................................................................................................v
Ch’angjo as a product of its temporality and locale ........................................................1
1.1. The Little Magazine .............................................................................................................3
1.2. The conditions of Ch’angjo’s inception ..............................................................................6
Ch’angjo and the Materiality of the Global Form.........................................................19
2.1. Visual Forms ......................................................................................................................19
2.2. Poetic Forms ......................................................................................................................31
The Korean language in Ch’angjo ................................................................................35
3.1. Orthographic choice and distribution.................................................................................36
3.2. Korean vernacularization and standardization ...................................................................43
3.3. Ch’angjo as translingual conduit .......................................................................................48
Ch’angjo as Creation .....................................................................................................52
4.1. Romanticism ......................................................................................................................55
4.2. Modernism .........................................................................................................................64
4.3. Gender Archetypes.............................................................................................................78
Conclusion .....................................................................................................................85
Bibliography ..................................................................................................................................87
v
List of Figures
Figure 1: Grid from Issue 8, page 117 .......................................................................................... 20
Figure 2: Advertisement for Yǒjagye, in Ch'angjo issue 2 ........................................................... 21
Figure 3: Title of Kaech’ǒk in its advertisement in the third issue. .............................................. 22
Figure 4 Ch’angjo issue 9 cover title ............................................................................................ 22
Figure 5: Cover art from Ch’angjo issue 8 ................................................................................... 24
Figure 6: Cover art from Ch’angjo issue 9 ................................................................................... 24
Figure 7: Cover art from Ch’angjo issue 5 ................................................................................... 25
Figure 8: A hyǒnmu from the inside of Kangsǒ Daemyo, a mural filled Goguryǒ burial mound in
P’yǒngannam-do (“Sasindo (hyǒnmu)” 2020) ............................................................................. 25
Figure 9: The Hexagram Qian from the Book of Changes ........................................................... 26
Figure 10: Symbols found on the back covers of issues 8 (left) and 9 (right). ............................. 26
Figure 11: Photograph of Kim Tongin from Ch’angjo issue 7 ..................................................... 29
Figure 12: Portrait of Chǒn Yǒng-t’aek from Ch’angjo issue 8 ................................................... 29
Figure 13: Photograph of Kim Hwan from Ch'angjo issue 9 ....................................................... 29
Figure 14: Image from Kim Hwan’s “Kohyang ǔi kil”, Ch’angjo issue 2 ................................... 30
Figure 15: picture of a vase printed in Ch’angjo issue 8 .............................................................. 31
Figure 16: First page of part II of Kim Tongin’s novel “Oh the frail-hearted” from Ch’angjo
issue 6. All text in one section per page. ....................................................................................... 37
Figure 17: First page of Kim Tongin's novel "Oh the frail-hearted" from Ch'angjo issue 5, text
divided into two sections per page. ............................................................................................... 37
vi
Figure 18: Kim Chong-sik's poetry "Nangin ǔi pom" from Ch'angjo issue 5, text divided into
three parts per page. ...................................................................................................................... 37
Figure 19: Seal on the back of Ch’angjo issue 8 .......................................................................... 45
1
Ch’angjo as a product of its temporality and locale
The late nineteenth century saw the global emergence of a new literary endeavor. Authors,
who had theretofore published their works through the medium and filter of various government,
religious, and large private publishing houses, decided to pursue a new avenue of self-
publication. Groups and networks of authors formed and began publishing their own magazines
funded by monetary contributions of the authors themselves and small fees from subscribers.
This began a trend known as the ‘little magazine movement’. These little magazines, which
promised literary experimentation and innovation, can be found in most national literatures in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Korean peninsula is no different. Little
magazines began popping up in Korea during the 1910s, possibly in response to the 6th
Publishing Law enacted by the Japanese in February of 1909, which put limitations on the
publication of political materials in Korea, leading the national publications at the time to
predominately print materials that would easily pass censorship (“Ch’ulp’an” 2020). One such
Korean little magazine was Ch’angjo (創造) The Creation1, a magazine that purported to be the
first magazine of ‘pure’ literature published in Korean, and whose mission can be glimpsed
through its title. Its writers sought to echo the societal developments and new ideologies
surrounding them through literary forms on the pages of their little magazine. Thus, their
endeavor was creation itself. Creation of a new literature fit for a modern Korea. Ch’angjo was
founded by four young Korean writers studying in Japan in the late 1910s: Chu Yo-han, Kim
Tongin, Chǒn Yǒng-t’aek, and Kim Hwan2. Together, they organized a literary coterie of writers
to contribute pieces to the publication and printed the magazine’s first issue in 1919. Ch’angjo
eventually drew in some of the greatest Korean writers of the age as members of its coterie.
This was a time of unrest on the Korean peninsula as independence movements, which had
been taking place for months, culminated in the large March 1st Movements of 1919. Under the
1 The English title “The Creation” first appears on the last page of the first issue alongside their own Romanized
form of the title, “Tsang-zo”.
2 According to Yu Pǒm-mo (2018), “Ch’angjo’s development was possible by means of Chu Yo-han supplying the
idea and Kim Tongin supplying the funds.” However, the actual origin of the idea is contested. Some say the idea
was Kim Hwan’s, who discussed it with Chu months before Chu proposed the idea to Kim Tongin (Yi 2014, 44).
2
thumb of Japanese colonial rule, much of the outward expression of Korean culture had been
repressed in an attempt to suppress political dissent and opposition to Japanese occupation
during the decade leading up to these movements, and it was at this point that Japan strategically
opted to relax its cultural repression policies in order to decrease the amount of political
upheaval the independence movements had been causing, thereby strengthening their political
grip by giving the Korean people a cultural outlet (Robinson 1988, 45). In this environment,
writers of varied backgrounds came together as they studied and lived in Japan. These colonial
citizens in the land of their conqueror chose to create what they asserted to be the first magazine
of ‘pure’ literature (sunmunye)—literature as an intentional form of modern artistic expression
purported to be apolitical and independent from any particular nation-state rhetoric; the term was
also used in opposition to mass literature designed predominately to entertain. It was also written
in the Korean language as opposed to Japanese or Classical Chinese. Ch’angjo’s nine issues
contain some influential works of Korean literature authored by writers who went on to be truly
influential in the Korean literary sphere. In this thesis, we look at Ch’angjo as a building block of
modern Korean literature, a conduit through which Korea’s creative literary drive passed, setting
foundations for future development and innovation. Through looking at the historical juncture
that made its publication possible, its material form, its language, and its literary content, we can
analyze the conditions, goals, and global visions for literature and society that were experienced
and held by this coterie of writers in the midst of colonial Korea.
This first chapter looks at the genre of the little magazine, how Ch’angjo fits into this
global movement, and how Ch’angjo became possible at this point in history. The temporality of
Ch’angjo affected its form and content; thus, Chapter 2 investigates the materiality of Ch’angjo
and how it compares with other examples of this global form, both in Korea and abroad. A large
part of the materiality of Ch’angjo is the language that was used, in terms of orthography, word
choice, and grammatical structure. Taking this into account, Chapter 3 looks closely at Ch’angjo
as part of the Korean vernacularization movement, including its move towards standardization of
the Korean language, the orthographic and dialectal choices of the authors, and how various
speech levels are employed. Finally, diving deeper into the semantics and contents of Ch’angjo,
in Chapter 4, we explore its literary pieces and how they evoke characteristics of both
Romanticism and Modernism. This fourth chapter also looks closely at the treatment of gender in
the almost exclusively male-authored works published in its pages. Through an investigation of
3
Ch’angjo’s temporal, cultural, and historical context, as well as its materiality, language, and
literary content, this thesis aims to place Ch’angjo among other innovative literary endeavors of
the little magazine movement, as well as among the works that created the foundations of
modern Korean literature. On every level from the superficial to the semantic, Ch’angjo’s
innovative endeavor in search of a modern Korean literature demonstrates a desire of the coterie
members to both assert a place for Korea among the world’s literatures and simultaneously
produce a sense of locality within the same literary works.
1.1. The Little Magazine
Little magazines became popular in the late 19th century as a conduit for artistic and literary
innovation unfettered by the capitalist structure of large publishing firms as well as an authorial
response to restrictions by the larger publication industry on their creativity and innovation. A
magazine was generally considered ‘little’ on the basis of their readership and publication
numbers. The magazines that fall under the umbrella of this little magazine movement vary
widely from publication to publication, as each, though following the pattern of innovation and
breaking with previously adhered-to forms, was still dramatically affected by its locale. The little
magazines’ appearance in Korea followed closely on the tails of the establishment of the first
modern publishing houses, firms established by various bodies to publish specific kinds of books
and journals3, which began in 1883 (“Ch’ulp’an” 2020). Thus, the publication industry was
relatively new, and breaking with it was probably more easily imagined in the early 20th century
Korean context than it would have been in locations where publishing houses were more
historically engrained. Bulson (2017), in his study of the little magazine as a world form defines
the little magazine as a “noncommercial, experimental medium produced in limited quantities
(usually under one thousand) for a select group of readers between 1910 and 1940” (2). He
further elaborated that “Every little magazine has been shaped by specific social, political, and
economic realities that determined when it could be printed, where, how and for whom” (2).
Thus, each little magazine, regardless of how it was conceived, constructed, printed, and
3 The first modern publishing house (Pangmun’guk)was established by the Korean government in 1883 to publish
government newspapers and texts. Public publishing houses (min’gan ch’ulp’an) began being established the next
year, each with a (“Ch’ulp’an” 2020).
4
distributed, was formed by the conditions in which its writers were writing and the place and
time in which it was printed.
Despite these geographic considerations, there are broad consistencies that can be seen
between these little magazines regardless of language, culture, and historical juncture. In
practical terms, Bulson (2017) claims that little magazines were “decommercialized,
decapitalized, and decentered” (14, italics original). Because these non-commercial magazines
were mostly funded through capital put forward by the founding writers and artists supplemented
with money that came in from subscribers, there were often inadequate funds to cover all of the
costs of printing and postage, leaving the writers with a net loss, highlighting that they were not
being published for profit. Because these little magazines were independently published, they
were not subject to the power structure of any centralized publishing marketplace (Bulson 2017,
48). They therefore didn’t have to endure the demands and critiques from more than the
contributing members of their associated literary coterie. Also, as Bulson notes, these little
magazines were not subjected to any sort of metropolitan capital through which people and
publications had to move. They were not tied to Paris, London, New York, or Tokyo. Though
these metropolitan areas also produced their fair share of little magazines, other equally
successful magazines emerged from less centralized zones.
In terms of content and style, little magazines also displayed some similarities across
borders. While all little magazines cannot be categorized into the same literary period or genre,
and indeed, have no definable static form across the publications that make up the body of little
magazines, Melinda Knight (1996) asserted of the American little magazine, that its essence
could be sensed in “their rejection of mainstream literary culture and its emphasis on the moral
basis of art, their abhorrence of middle-class values and beliefs, and the counter-cultural
personae they adopted” (29). This helped to label many little magazines as anti-capitalist
publications, an assertion aided by the net loss that most of the publications reported. However,
not all little magazines were anti-capitalist, and there are as many examples of conservative
publications as there are of progressive ones. These same American little magazines referred to
by Knight (1996) also “celebrated exoticism and reveled in decadence” as well as “demonstrated
how modernism embodied both progressive and regressive impulses” (29). Some of these same
characteristics can be seen in the literature of Ch’angjo as it welcomes exoticism with middle
class leanings, as well as in the little magazines of Japan, Germany, Russia, Argentina, India,
5
Italy, France, the UK, the United States, Uganda, and across Central and South America (Bulson
2017, 3). Coming from so many political, cultural, and social backgrounds, the form must
inherently differ between magazines, and the form of the little magazine was highly adaptable
“as much for conservative ends as…for countercultural ones” (Bulson 2017, 4). While some
writers were writing only for local audiences and others had subscribers in nations around the
world, they were all working on literary and artistic innovation, expanding and adapting their
writing and the form of the magazine as they encountered new styles and attempted to form new
genres, forms, and foundations of literature. This does not mean to imply that all of these little
magazines were imitating each other, rather they were all innovating their own individual
literatures through a similar periodical form whose goals seem to have been innovation and
celebration of progress—though definitions of progress differed—adaptation of other forms to
local literatures, and the search for an ideal of true art and literature. Bulson (2017), in referring
to the little magazine as a ‘world form’, uses the term to direct attention to its “multiplicity and
in doing so foreground the fact that it never belonged to a single country or continent and was
never contained by geopolitical borders, no matter how they were configured” (13). In the case
of Ch’angjo, its inception came about through the influence of multiple trajectories of literary
flow. These Korean writers encountered literary magazines, known as dōjin zasshi or dōjinshi,
during their studies in Japan. These literary magazines had been around since 1885 with the
publication of Garakuta bunko, which according to some accounts heralded the beginnings of
modernization in Japanese literature (Bulson 2017, 60). Over the next few decades, the existing
form of the dōjinshi was seized by literary coteries, used as a platform for experimentation with
the foreign literary forms that were entering the country as it opened to the world, and ultimately
transformed into little magazines that matched the global form in experimentation, helping to
usher in literary modernism. The freedom of the dōjinshi gave writers the liberty to experiment
with vernacularization—forming an integral part of the genbun itchi movement—and new
literary forms like the I-novel, becoming “part of a more widespread tendency in Japan to treat
literature as ‘linguistic art’” (Bulson 2017, 61).
As in Japan, the little magazine was often the conduit through which new Western-style
structures were introduced and eventually adapted to national literatures. In reference to the little
magazines in India, Bulson (2017) writes “Once the magazine arrived in a country such as India,
it underwent a process of assimilation and adaptation…I have in mind the way that the little
6
magazine is at first a place to absorb Western models before an indigenous literature can
emerge” (69). While this statement problematically implies that indigenous literatures require
Western models to be able to exist, we can accept a softer form of this assertion, that some
modern forms of indigenous literatures that have adapted various Western models, did so by
tempering them through the testing grounds of the little magazine. The little magazine is
therefore a form in which indigenous literatures confront foreign models of literature and
indigenize them to suit local literary forms.
Little magazines created a sort of network of artists and writers who were innovating in
different ways but parallel to one another, and “together [little magazines] generated a national
and international system for communication that had the power to make writers and critics alike
feel as if a network was out there somewhere, even if they were not exactly sure how to map it or
where they fit in” (Bulson 2017, 72). As these authors celebrated the exotic, they also
incorporated influences from each other in their experimentations, in a somewhat cosmopolitan
drive towards a form of world literature in many cases. For example, while Japan was
incorporating Western notions of the ‘self’, Humanism, Realism, Romanticism, Modernism, etc.,
the American little magazine The Chap-Book featured posters from Will H. Bradley, who was
heavily influenced by Japanese wood block prints. Another American little magazine, M’lle New
York, featured a café scene on its cover including a background of Japanese lanterns, showing
aesthetic influence adapted from Japan (Knight 1996, 7). Little magazines are interesting in their
shared mission, but widely diversified execution. They were published by radical aesthetes,
countercultural nationalists, socialists, fascists, misogynists, and revolutionaries, yet they all
formed a network of innovation separate from the commercialised publishing sphere. The
prevalence of the little magazine in literatures around the world was one condition that enabled
Ch’angjo to come into existence. However, other conditions were also necessary for its
realization.
1.2. The conditions of Ch’angjo’s inception
Along with the burgeoning little magazine movement appearing throughout national and
transnational literatures, a number of other preparatory events occurred leading up to Ch’angjo’s
publication that made its existence possible. The historical events surrounding its first issue, the
7
contributors involved, as well as the location of its initial publication created the possibility of its
arrival on the Korean literary scene.
Released on the first of February 1919, Ch’angjo’s debut issue was published a month prior
to the famous March 1st Independence Movements of 1919 and in the midst of the smaller
movements leading up to that large event. Many of the magazine’s organizers and contributors
supported these movements and took active roles therein, contributing to policy changes that
affected Koreans’ rights to publish in their own language. The timing of Ch’angjo’s publication
was not coincidental. It was not merely the loosening of Japanese cultural rule that needed to
occur for its publication, for even in the relative independence of the late Chosǒn Dynasty and
the brief period of the Great Han Empire preceding Japanese occupation, the publication of this
little magazine would still have been impossible.
In the latter half of the 19th Century, the Korean peninsula’s close relationship with China,
which had been a conduit through which cultural influence flowed for centuries, further declined.
Chosǒn scholars still utilized Classical Chinese for the majority of their writing, and written
forms and styles emulating those of famous Chinese scholars and poets were still held up as the
ideal. This began to shift, however, as the power structures moved away from tribute to the
Manchu-controlled Qing dynasty towards a more independent view of Korea as a sovereign
nation. This disenfranchisement with the Qing, along with increased influence from other
sources, including new religious and political ideology streaming into East Asia from the West,
resulted in a lot of unrest, including the Tonghak Rebellions of 1894 and eventually the Sino-
Japanese War of the same year, in which the Qing military was defeated by the Japanese
military. This victory gave Japan more of a reputation for being modern, not only in terms of
military power, but also in terms of technology and education. At the end of this war, the Treaty
of Shimonoseki was signed which, among other things, stated Qing China’s official recognition
of the Korean peninsula’s independence and autonomy, effectively ending centuries of tributary
status—this also paved the first steps of Japan’s path towards seizing Korea’s diplomatic
sovereignty in 1905 and their ultimate annexation to Japan in 1910. Following on the Tonghak
Rebellions, the Korean imperial government, under the influence of Japan, began to enact the
Kabo reforms. These reforms were largely an effort to modernize and enlighten Korea as it
headed into the 20th century and included—to name just a small number of the reforms—the
abolishment of the traditional class system and slavery which disrupted the established social
8
order and assertions that obtaining a government post would be based on merit rather than class
and that official documents were to be written in han’gǔl rather than Sino-Korean characters
(Schmid 2002, 29).
During this final decade of the 19th Century, the uprisings that led to the Sino-Japanese
War, the Tonghak Rebellions, the enactment of many sovereignty and equality-based reforms,
were evidence of a rise in feelings of cultural nationalism. This is when, after centuries of scorn,
educated Korean men began embracing King Sejong’s Korean script and the first han’gǔl
newspaper was published, the Tongnip Sinmun. This newspaper was run by the Independence
Club, a nationalist body that helped establish the foundations from which “we can trace the
evolution of Korean nationalist ideology and the crystallization of the national identity formation
process” (Robinson 1986, 38). The Tongnip Sinmun helped to begin the establishment of
publication in han’gǔl as standard practice, paving the way for little magazines like Ch’angjo to
appear on the scene.
Following the signing of the Treaty of Shimonoseki and the Korean peninsula’s consequent
break from Qing China, the Korean relationship with Japan grew increasingly close, culminating
in official annexation in 1910. This relationship contributed to the heightened ability of Koreans
of a certain class to be able to pursue higher education in Japan. In Japanese colleges and
universities, Korean intellectuals, including those who eventually founded Ch’angjo and other
literary magazines throughout the colonial period, encountered new literature from around the
world which inspired some with a desire to create ‘pure’ literature in the Korean language. Back
on the Korean peninsula, for the first decade of Japan’s colonial rule, the government ruled the
peninsula through strict military rule focused on subduing Korean customs and culture and
transitioning the Korean peninsula into a modern state. This regime implemented harsh
restrictions on the social usage of the Korean language and practice of Korean customs. Towards
the end of the 1910s, independence movements on the peninsula reached a height, and Prime
Minister Hara Kei was forced to rethink the Japanese approach to subjugating the Korean people.
He appointed Admiral Saitō Makoto to be the Governor General of Korea. Saitō, with the help of
various colleagues, then introduced a new set of policies on the Korean peninsula beginning
what was known as “Cultural rule” in 1919, after Korean demands for independence culminated
in the March 1st Demonstration, in which an estimated million people took to the streets to
protest the Japanese military regime on March 1st and in the weeks that followed.
9
According to Michael E. Robinson (1988), Saitō and his team designed their reforms to
maintain strong political control over the Korean peninsula, by loosening the policies that tried to
push out Korean language and customs. “Naked coercion was replaced by a softer but even more
effective policy of manipulation and co-optation…In legal matters, Saitō chose to concentrate on
areas where Korean cultural sensibilities could be mollified without diluting colonial authority”
(45). With these new policies in place, a space was opened up for—heavily censored—Korean
activists to write to the masses through use of han’gǔl, leading to a deluge of Korean language
publications: newspapers, magazines, literary journals, etc.. Before Saitō’s relaxation of cultural
restrictions, though some publications written and published in the Korean language existed, they
were limited due to the strict political guidelines they had to adhere to in order to receive
government passes for publication (Cumings 2005, 156). Following the introduction of cultural
rule, these restrictions were loosened, though they did not wholly disappear and newspapers and
magazines still underwent heavy censorship.
While Ch’angjo’s first issue was actually published in February of 1919, the month leading
up to the March 1st movement and prior to the official enactment of Saitō’s reforms, it benefitted
from the environment that led up to the instigation of these new cultural policies. Ch’angjo’s use
of the Korean language as its mode of literary expression was made possible through the
preceding movements and reforms that had changed the social stigma attached to the use of
han’gǔl by scholars and activists. It was then able to continue the publication of its nine issues
unimpeded due to the loosened restrictions that resulted from the 1919 independence
movements. While many of the authors of the era were active participants in these same
movements, they also simultaneously owed much of their ability to write and publish to Korea’s
relationship with Japan, in particular their ability to study in Japan and encounter new literature
and ideology. Following on this, Ch’angjo made itself possible through its subject matter. By
asserting itself as a journal of ‘pure’ literature written as artistic expression, it skirted policies
that required rigorous government vetting for publications that addressed political affairs or
current events (Robinson 1988, 46). Its limited circulation also most likely contributed to its
continued publication.
The publication of Ch’angjo also rode the coattails of various vernacularization movements
in East Asia, chiefly those of China and Japan. This enabled not only the widespread acceptance
of literary publication in han’gǔl or in mixed script (han’gǔl with Sino-Korean characters), but
10
also for innovation with the language and the freer use of authors’ local dialects within their
works, particularly as a standard form of written Korean was still being established at this point.
Many pieces in Ch’angjo utilize vocabulary and idioms from the P’yǒngan dialect as that was
home to many of the contributing authors. Kim Tongin’s fiction in the first few issues also sets a
precedent for the use of the plain-style formal endings in much of the literary pieces in Ch’angjo
itself, as well as in other publications that appeared during this time period and thereafter.
Though the topic of vernacularization will be analyzed in more depth in chapter 3, it is
important to note here that the vernacularization movements which took place across East Asia
in the late 1800s and early 1900s, dramatically affected Korean literature and consequently
Ch’angjo. Prior to this, there wasn’t even a concept of Korean literature as we now conceive it.
The term munhak (文學), which we now translate as ‘literature’, through the process of
translanguaging, with Japan as intermediary, took on new meaning around this time. Many
words were repurposed in this way to embody newly encountered Western-European ideas, and
thus the concept we now almost universally conceive of as literature entered East Asia (Yi 2011).
Ch’angjo served to continue and solidify the importation of this new concept of munhak into
Korea. The vernacularization movements helped create a means for importing Western concepts
into East Asian languages, all while asserting a phonocentric view on written language, with
calls for the adoption of various phonetic orthographies to replace ideographic Chinese
characters. In Korea, han’gǔl became the orthography of choice. This morphophonemic Korean
script had existed since the 1400s; however, it was considered by most of the educated elite to be
the writing system of women and peasants, thus literature written by the learned was carried out
in Classical Chinese. However, as the Chosǒn Dynasty declined and the threat of colonization by
Japan loomed closer and closer, Korean nationalists began to cling to the han’gǔl script as
evidence of a culture that was unique to the Korean peninsula, untainted by influence from its
powerful neighbors. The use of han’gǔl thereby served to create a community and took on
nationalist undertones. These undertones are felt in Ch’angjo which used the Korean language to
further establish the borders of this community as well as to place Korea among a network of
nations. This was accomplished through the imagined community—à la Benedict Anderson
(2006)—of the little magazine world. The act of creation resulting in the publication of little
magazines was the assertion of the creators that they belonged as part of this imagined global
literary community. At the same time, by joining the vernacularization movement and writing
11
many of the pieces in Ch’angjo using either han’gǔl or a mixed script, they attempted to widen
the reach of their magazine, establishing another imagined community for implicit nationalist
purposes, using vernacular Korean in an attempt to establish a Korean nation-state in the midst of
Japanese colonialism.
Taking this historical moment into account, who were these men who founded Ch’angjo?
“The members of Ch’angjo were fairly homogenous in terms of their education, hometown, and
religion”, writes Lee Jaeyon (2015), summing up the list of contributors to Ch’angjo as
predominately Japanese-educated Koreans from P’yǒngan province, with Christian backgrounds.
During the Japanese colonial period, P’yǒngan province, particularly the southern part of
P’yǒngan which contains the city of P’yǒngyang, was known for its educational institutions.
According to Kim Dong Hwan (2016), South P’yǒngan province had a higher rate of elementary
education than any other province, this was related to the higher number of protestants present in
P’yǒngan province, and their associated influence on educating as many people as possible. It
was also associated with the merchant class sending their children to be educated at higher rates,
and due to the prominence of P’yǒngyang and its proximity to China, there were many
merchants in the province (49). Thus, it is unsurprising that many of the scholars who opted to
pursue higher education in Japan were from P’yǒngan.
As mentioned earlier, four main authors were involved in the creation of Ch’angjo: Kim
Tongin (1900-51), Chu Yo-han (1900-79), Kim Hwan (1893-?), and Chǒn Yǒng-t’aek (1894-
1968). The most prolific of these four, Kim Tongin, is often given most of the credit for
Ch’angjo’s inception, however, as remarked in the introduction to this section, Kim Tongin’s
major contribution was capital, while the idea is largely attributed to Chu, and possibly Kim
Hwan, according to some sources (Yi 2014, 44). Of the 101 pieces published in the nine issues of
Ch’angjo, these four main authors contributed 51, or slightly over half, while the remaining 50
pieces were written by 14 different contributors. The contributions of Kim Hwan are often
overlooked, as his name is not as well known. However, recent scholarly work has shown that he
was just as integral in the publication of Ch’angjo as the other founders, if not more so. Kim
Hwan wrote pieces ranging from theoretical essays including “A Theory of art” (misullon), to a
serialized novel Sinbi ǔi mak (Shroud of Mystery). He wrote in various genres including essay,
prose, and travel writing. His picture is one of only three author photographs featured in
Ch’angjo, lending credence to the assertions that Kim Hwan was an influential member of the
12
coterie. According to Yi Sayu (2014), when the three other founding members Kim Tongin, Chu
Yo-han, and Chǒn Yǒng-t’aek, along with other members of the coterie, left Tokyo during the
various independence movements of 1919, it was Kim Hwan who remained in Japan and
protected the history of Ch’angjo by ensuring its publication and distribution (Yi 2014, 47).
While Kim Hwan never rose to the literary fame that the other three main contributors did, there
are records of his fervor for the magazine, and he made severable notable recruitments, including
Kim Yǒp and Ch’oe Sǔng-man.
Though the matter of whose original idea Ch’angjo was is a point of contention, the order
in which the idea began to progress towards actualization is a bit clearer. According to Yi (2014),
recruitment for contributors started in November of 1918, with Chu Yo-han and Kim Tongin
having decided to move forward with publishing a little magazine. They first tracked down Chǒn
Yǒng-t’aek, who agreed to be part of the project. Chǒn Yǒng-t’aek then recommended Kim
Hwan, whom Chu had already met and discussed some sort of project with earlier that year. Kim
Hwan also agreed to be part of it, and through his help, they were also able to recruit well-known
Korean artist Ch’oe Sǔng-man. At the time of the first issue’s publication, Kim Tongin and Chu
Yo-han were both 18 years old, Chǒn Yǒng-t’aek was 25 years old, and Kim Hwan was a few
weeks shy of 26. All were living and studying in Tokyo, all had studied either art or literature at
a college in Tokyo, and all were involved in the independence movements of the time in some
way. This brief intersection of these men’s lives before they all parted ways, due to
independence activities and family obligations, set the stage for Ch’angjo’s launch. Furthermore,
the existing network of connections between these four main contributors and the writers of their
acquaintance, often based on their hometown networks, helped to expand the body of
contributions to the magazine and broaden its scope.
The idea for the magazine was conceived during the authors’ time studying and living in
Tokyo, Japan. Thus, while each issue is written in the Korean language, and the settings of the
various stories are generally on the Korean peninsula, the actual printing of the first seven issues
took place in Tokyo, with only the final two issues being printed in Seoul. The first and foremost
reason that the publication took place in Japan is because it was where the writers were based
when the first issue was published, and they had been able to find a printer who already had
moveable Korean type from having previously printed a Korean translation of the Bible (Lee
2012, 48). It is possible that the authors’ Christian ties may have aided them in finding a
13
publisher as well. The final two issues were printed in Seoul, though specifics are unclear as to
why the publication transferred from Tokyo to Seoul. Kim initially footed the funds to pay for
the publication of the magazine because he came from a wealthy family and had inherited money
from his father, who had passed away a year earlier. However, even his funds ran out and he was
forced to liquidate many of his assets to continue publication (Lee 2012, 49). Based on their
educational backgrounds and their ability to fund higher education in Japan, all of the founding
members of the coterie, as well as many of the contributing members, were at least middle if not
upper-class Koreans. This is important to note as they were attempting to establish a modern
literature for the Korean people. However, their conception of what ‘Korea’ is was necessarily
influenced by their social standing on the peninsula.
This concept of Korea was influenced by their conceptions of existent Korean culture. Jin-
Kyung Lee (2000) wrote of the ambivalent nature of the cultural sphere in general, and of
literature specifically during this particular time period. While Korea was a colony and therefore
subordinate to Japan, the Korean people were still attempting to create the notion of Korea as
nation-state, which required a cultural identity. In some lines of thought, however, culture and
literature were free from the power of the colonial authority, and therefore de-politicized to an
extent; although, “it was precisely this de-politicized aspect of modern culture that allowed it to
be mobilised for the nationalist agenda of reforms and education” (Lee 2000, 4-5). The creators
of Ch’angjo used this cultural sphere for their attempts to establish a modern Korean literature,
an attempt that was also professedly non-political, steering clear of explicitly addressing the
political situation on the peninsula at the time, but with an implicitly political agenda as they
utilised vernacular Korean and addressed and questioned aspects of Korean culture symbolically
through their subject matter. In fact, the act of ignoring the Japanese occupation in many of the
novels of Ch’angjo is a glaring act of omission with political undertones. Thus, not overtly
politicizing Ch’angjo allowed for an implicit pushing forward of a nationalist agenda through
creating a Korean literature devoid of Japan, despite all of the authors’ deep connections with the
imperial country.
It is also notable that the idea of Ch’angjo and its realization as a platform for a
distinctively Korean literature took place through a group of art and literature students in Tokyo
because of what was happening in Japanese literature at the time. In Japan, this was a time of
great literary innovation and discovery, which the Korean students were able to observe and
14
experience. Korean students encountered many new literary ideas that they were able to
synthesize and translate into the Korean context, serving as inspiration as they produced their
own literary works. One of these new ideas was that of landscape, which ultimately led to a
discovery of interiority and subjectivity. Karatani Kojin writes of the importance of the discovery
of landscape in the first chapter of Origins of Modern Japanese Literature (1993). He states that
landscape is not just the outside, it is also interior, that which is usually considered
backgrounded. Landscape involves self-consciousness, the emergence of background and
perspectives which bring into relief the concepts of subject and object. This discovery of
landscape was essential in formulating a new Korean literature.
In Yi Kwang-su’s essay “Munhak-iran hao” (What is Literature?), published in late 1916,
he expounds his theory of new literature, not a theory of what literature has always been, but
rather what he perceived the trajectory of literature should be as Korean society moved forward,
incorporating literature as art, imagination, and creativity within the pre-existing concept of
literature as scholarship. This incorporation was not the invention of Yi, but rather a translingual
adoption of Western European ideology from existing Japanese literary innovations and
adaptations of new ideas, which were entrenched in Japanese literature starting in the late 1880s
(Hwang 1999, 15). These ideas continued to be dispersed to writers, readers, and scholars
through the little magazine movement. “An examination of the numerous gazettes, which
provided a public forum for new knowledge during the patriotic enlightenment period, reveals
them to be a laboratory for the many translations of Western terms created in modern Japan”
(Hwang 1999, 8). Though appearing after this enlightenment period, Ch’angjo continued to use
these previously lab-tested terms as well as translating new terms, styles, and ideas into the
Korean literary canon. The aforementioned discovery of landscape, as elucidated by Karatani,
was one such idea that was translated into Korean literature. This discovery of landscape,
combined with the vernacularization of literature and the use of han’gǔl, allowed Korean writers
to discover and assert their own subjectivity. By analyzing and describing backgrounds, contexts,
their own self-consciousness, and by extension their own subjectivity in contrast to these things,
Korean writers were able to use language and a new concept of literature as unifying
characteristics to create a national community. Yi Kwang-su asserted of the new Korean
literature, “Literature must take all of its material from life. These materials are, namely, the
conditions of daily existence and the thoughts and emotions of life, a piece of writing becomes
15
literature if these elements are embedded in it” (Yi 2011, 296)4. The discovery of the Korean
landscape of life and the subjectivity of the Korean person within it helped to establish the
difference between the writing of the past and the new literature.
As evidenced by the patriotic enlightenment gazettes referred to by Hwang (1999), as well
as the Yi’s attempts to establish theories of a new literature in the time leading up to “What is
Literature?” (1916) among the other literary and technological innovations of the early 20th
century, translated terminology and ideology had been entering Korean literature for some time
prior to Ch’angjo’s inception. What is widely considered to be the first modern Korean novel, Yi
Kwang-su’s Mujǒng, had already been published in serialized form in the national Korean
newspaper Maeil Sinbo. Given these developments and the modernization of society and
technology taking place in East Asia at this time, as well as the education levels and social
connections of the writers involved in Ch’angjo, we have to wonder, why the little magazine?
Why did they opt to self-publish at their own expense rather than publish in one of the many
Korean language publications of the late 1910s? To understand this, we have to look at the
history of the little magazine in East Asia, and more specifically at the types of little magazines
already being published in Korea at this time. At the point in literary history that gave birth to
Ch’angjo, the genre of the little magazine had already been around for decades, and knowledge
of this form had had time to circulate to most corners of the world, helped along by the
developments in global systems of mail delivery. As mentioned earlier, Japan’s dōjinshi had
existed for decades already, and during the early 1900s, culminating in Japan’s modernist high
point in the 1920s, Japanese writers built on this established form and founded various little
magazines such as Kodo, Shirakaba, Waseda Bungaku, Mita bungaku, Teikoku bungaku, Aka to
kuro, MAVO, Damudamu, GE.GJMGJGAM.PRRR.GJMGEM, A, Baichi Shubun, etc.. These
little magazines, heavily influenced by the magazines that Japanese writers had encountered
from central and western European avant-gardists, would not have escaped notice of the Korean
students studying in Japanese universities. The privileged economic situations of most of the
Korean students interested in literature and art, combined with their encounters with the global
form of the little magazine and its adaptation into Japanese literature were the necessary
4 Translation by Jooyeon Rhee
16
conjuncture for the conception of a plan to introduce the form of the little magazine, and
consequently many more exterior forms in the emergent process of birthing a modern Korean
literature.
These little magazines were some of the first platforms on which Korean writers
established foundations of a modern Korean literature imbued with elements of Realism,
Romanticism, Naturalism, Humanism, and various other -isms that the writers encountered as
they studied the literature of the world through the lens of Japanese translations and education.
“Romanticism helped Koreans achieve literary modernity, but it required contradictory
endeavours: that of looking out to the world through Japan and the Japanese language and,
simultaneously, of cultivating new ways to organize their own feelings through their own mother
tongue and the forms appropriate to it” (Shin 2019, 161). Thus, the Western influence, was not
truly a ‘pure’ Western influence at this point as it wasn’t directly encountered by the Korean
authors at the beginning of the twentieth century, rather it was the Japanese translation of the
West that heavily influenced Korean writing and the foundational forms of literature established
in Korea’s little magazines.
The little magazine’s flexibility provided coteries of Korean authors the space to write in
innovative styles that would typically not have been picked up by larger publishing houses.
Many of the forms present in the pages of Ch’angjo had not yet been tried on the Korean
audience and therefore acceptance for publication in more of the mainstream papers would have
been difficult, as Ch’angjo’s readership was generally limited to literary-minded scholars. But
what of the other Korean little magazines? As mentioned earlier, a number of literary magazines
published through existing literary coteries existed. What set Ch’angjo apart from these other
magazines was their goal of writing only ‘pure’ literature in the Korean language. Other
magazines posted in either mixed script or Classical Chinese, some even in Japanese, and their
content was not necessarily aimed at ‘pure’ literature, rather it was often mixed with opinion
articles, editorials on current events, and works of popular fiction designed to entertain readers as
opposed to exposing them to enlightenment ideas and artistic expression. The Ch’angjo coterie
wanted to do something different that could not be done within the pages of the established
major publications or other existing little magazines, so they started their own. The investment
provided by Kim Tongin, while not seeing any monetary returns, was an investment in the future
of modern Korean literature.
17
Self-publication and establishing a little magazine also left writers free to write for other
literary magazines in addition to Ch’angjo. As Shin (2019) observed, “Because the literary
professions in Korea were not fully differentiated, the journals were run by small groups of
people who were committed to more than one journals simultaneously” (156). This enabled
authors whose work was rejected by one little magazine to seek out the literary community of
another magazine for publication of their work. This was the case with Kim Hwan, whose work
in Ch’angjo is mostly essay, literary criticism and translation, as Kim Tongin did not deem his
short story “Chayǒn ǔi chagak” (“Awareness of Nature”) worthy of publication in Ch’angjo.
Kim Hwan, however, was able to find another magazine, Hyǒndae (Modern Times), willing to
publish his works of fiction (Lee 2015). In fact, from 1919 through 1927, Kim Hwan published
16 works of literature, six of which were short stories, yet only one, “Sinbi ǔi mak” (“Shroud of
Mystery”), made it into Ch’angjo. The other five short stories were published in five different
magazines (Yi 2014). Kim Hwan alone was involved in contributing to no less than six different
little magazines in his more prolific years as a writer. Thus, the flexibility of the little magazine
as a form enabled writers to be parts of various groups and form multiple connections to ensure
the publication of their work. Not only was the little magazine network important in creating a
global community of literary innovation, it also helped form local communities of writers, with
authors being able to interact and contribute to various publications with different aims and
goals.
Ch’angjo’s aim of creating ‘pure’ literature and their decision to self publish in the form of
a little magazine, enabled this group of Korean writers to skirt certain restrictions placed on them
by the Japanese government, which could otherwise have further limited what they would have
been able to write. While the magazine was intended for works of ‘pure’ literature and the topics
steer clear of the overtly political, as mentioned previously, literature, as part of culture, can be
ambivalent in nature, and while seemingly apolitical, it can be used in building up a national
culture separate from that of the colonizing power, thus giving it political force, despite its
apolitical intents—though it is difficult to believe assertions that nine issues of a magazine run
by confirmed participants in the various independence movements of 1919 could be without
political intent. We, therefore, must view Ch’angjo, in its mission to expand notions of Korean
individuality, creativity, and nation, as political in effect, even if it was never asserted as an
organ of the independence movements of its time.
18
In the ensuing chapters, we analyze Ch’angjo at various depths. Each level of analysis
allows us to see its aims, the execution thereof, and its role in building the foundations of modern
Korean literature. From its materiality, to its linguistic components, culminating in its content
and various subtexts, Ch’angjo was integral as a platform for the creation of new, ‘pure’
literature, a training ground for writers as they discovered and asserted their own subjectivity,
and a conduit through which global ideologies and forms were translated into the local context of
Korean literature.
19
Ch’angjo and the Materiality of the Global Form
While language, content, and style varied from little magazine to little magazine, in both
the global little magazine community and the local Korean one, there were certain material and
visual elements that helped unite and affiliate magazines of this genre across political and
linguistic boundaries. These elements included covers, page layouts, printing techniques,
typographical style, and publication materials (Bulson, 2017). Of these elements, innovations in
cover pages, page layouts, and typographical style can be seen to develop through the issues of
Ch’angjo thereby linking it to the wider global little magazine movement. In this chapter, we
look at the physical materials, as well as the visuality of the components printed in Ch’angjo.
Bulson writes that “when it comes to the little magazine, form is material, material is form, and
the analysis of one necessarily involves factoring in the other” (2017, 21). Thus, while the
materials themselves contributed to the form of the publication, the material within Ch’angjo
also contributes to its place both as a foundational publication in the history of modern Korean
literature, and as an example of the global form of the little magazine.
2.1. Visual Forms
The physical materials which comprised Ch’angjo are not noteworthy in and of themselves,
but only as a comparison to the materials of other little magazines being published around the
same time. Ch’angjo was published from 1919-1921 on A5 sized paper. As one of the first little
magazines for the Korean peninsula, Ch’angjo didn’t follow the more abstract ventures into
Dadaism like many little magazines that came along later and in other parts of the world.
Ch’angjo’s release coincided with the development of the Japanese little magazine, which
delayed the majority of its material experimentation in the genre until 1924 when Futurism and
Dada had a great hold on some of the literary and artistic splinter groups in Japan (Bulson 2017,
61). The general aesthetic of the magazine, however, is very similar to other magazines of the
time period. The cover design, particularly that of the first four issues, is very similar to that of
Yǒjagye, which was being published at the same time. Though, as the issues progress, the covers
look less like those of other magazines and take on a style of their own. Issue 5 inaugurates the
inclusion of art on the cover, forcing the table of contents to the inner pages, and by issue 9 there
20
is a cover page, a title page, and even more pages have been added before the first works of
literature are found on page eight. As the magazine progressed through its issues, it became
longer and longer, with the first four issues averaging 72.5 pages and the last five issues
averaging 95.6 pages. These material components show that while Ch’angjo was created to be a
work of literary innovation, particularly in the beginning phases, these components followed the
general format of the existing little magazines the authors had already seen and interacted with.
One visual feature common to many little magazines across language and locale was the
inclusion of grids within the pages that through both their appearance and their content
connected little magazines to each other in a loose literary network. Bulson (2017) asserts that
this grid is present in all avant-garde little magazines and only disappears when “the avant-garde
print network breaks down around 1926” (57). Ch’angjo’s publication timeframe places it in the
prime period for using the grid as part of its interior design. Bulson also writes that these grids
were often lists of other magazines with shared readership or suggested magazines in which the
readers might be interested. Ch’angjo is no exception. At the end of each issue is a grid that
looks like Figure 15. In Ch’angjo, this specific grid, repeated with slight variations in each issue,
addresses the amount to be paid for a subscription, a warning against plagiarism for those
members considering submitting their
written work for publication,
advertisements, as well as information
about the publisher, agent, editor, and
other technical aspects of the magazine.
Though the information it contains may
seem mundane, the fact that they placed
the information creatively within a grid
creates a significant connection
between Ch’angjo and other global
little magazines.
5 Images from Ch’angjo are taken from the 1970 reprint (black and white) or the Adanmun’go 2016 scans (color).
Figure 1: Grid from Issue 8, page 117
21
Ch’angjo’s grids are not limited to this single box in each issue. In all of the issues except
issue seven, there are numerous pages divided into grids advertising other little magazines being
published by other Koreans, including Yǒjagye (Women’s
World), Kaech’ǒk (Cultivation), Hakchigwang (Lux Scientiae),
Hyǒndae (the present era), Nonggye (Farmer’s world),
Haewangsǒng (Neptune), Sǒul (The Seoul), and Haksaenggye
(Students’ world). Depending on the issue, these are either located
right after the table of contents or at the end of the magazine. The
text orientation in these grids lends itself to creating further grids
through written content and not only through drawn lines. Vertical
and horizontal text orientations are both used, often in the same
grid, to create organized space. Font size and type faces also vary
to give more structure to each of these grids. Figure 2 shows an
advertisement for the magazine Yǒjagye that appeared in
Ch’angjo’s second issue. Both horizontal and vertical text are used effectively to set apart
different sections of the advertisement. Small diamonds, triangles and vertical wavy lines are
also used to further create separate block spaces on the page. This combined used of text
orientation, lines, and repeated shapes serves to organize the page and create visually interesting
advertisements both for Ch’angjo itself, as well as for the numerous magazines that are
advertised within its pages.
Changing the orientation is not the only way in which the text is used to create visual
interest. Differing font sizes and type faces are also used in Ch’angjo to various effect, within
both the grids and Ch’angjo’s body of text as a whole. Literary reviews and critiques of each
other’s work by the authors of Ch’angjo is not very common. Only four review articles appear in
all nine issues. In terms of type, it is interesting to note that reviews by Kim Tongin were printed
in a smaller typeface than other pieces of literature, including the reviews contributed by other
authors (Lee 2015). There is no explanation for this editorial decision. It could simply be due to
space, or it could be Kim Tongin re-asserting himself as editor, as the font size of his two
reviews is the same size as the other editorial notes in the same issue (Lee 2015, 85). Lee (2015),
writing as a critic himself, also surmises that the font size represents the ethos of Ch’angjo to
front the creative and literary while downplaying critiques and reviews, an ethos that was
Figure 2: Advertisement for
Yǒjagye, in Ch'angjo issue 2
22
possibly symptomatic of a literature that “had not yet developed to the point of being able to
produce critical reviews” (85). Thus, as an author, the font difference could possibly have been
Kim Tongin’s effort to put his strongest foot forward. Knowing that the fiction and poetry of
Ch’angjo was far stronger than its critical reviews, he shrunk his two reviews and made them
more inconspicuous. Changing font size is also utilized in advertisements as well. On the pages
of advertisements and calls for coterie members, changes in font size typically serve to
emphasize certain words and phrases, a standard advertising practice. On some pages, the
characters are written with a heavier hand giving them an almost bold appearance. The text of
these advertisements begins to take on the visual appearance of text in Western print advertising
in its boldness, size variations, and the ways it uses design to draw the readers’ eye to what is
being advertised.
These creative experimentations with text extended to the use of
positive and negative space as well. While in general, the Sino-Korean
characters and han’gǔl appear as black ink creating their shapes as the
positive space. In some instances, particularly in advertisements, the
characters can be created through the use of negative space in a
rectangle of black ink, as in the advertisement seen in Figure 3 for
Kaech’ǒk, the Korean peninsula’s first regional literary magazine.
Finally, one of the most immediately noticeable differences in
type face is the style used on the cover pages. For the first eight issues,
a standard typeface for modern Sino-Korean characters is used, but
with the last issue they decided to experiment with a freer font,
different from they typical printed calligraphic style of the time,
hearkening back to
the much older seal
script style characters, thereby renewing an
old form to create the new. To these seal-
script-esque characters is added a blue
shadow, which makes the title appear to pop
up from the page, almost three-
dimensionally—see figure 4. In this shift in
Figure 3: Title of Kaech’ǒk
in its advertisement in the
third issue.
Figure 4 Ch’angjo issue 9 cover title
23
the last issue, we can see an embrace of tradition, while simultaneously innovating and creating a
new Korean literature.
This mix of custom, creativity, and innovation can be seen through the various images
contained within Ch’angjo as well. While its contents are predominately written poetry and
prose, various images can be found scattered throughout the issues. The images can be divided
into three general categories: cover art, photographic portraits, and illustrations. While the artists
and creators of the various illustrations, drawings, and photographs are not given credit within
these pages, their works serve to add a different character to the magazine as it develops and
changes from issue to issue.
We start by looking at Ch’angjo’s covers. As the magazine was an exercise in creating
literature in the Korean language and was necessarily full of experimentation that met with
varying levels of success, every issue did not follow the same form in terms of content, format,
length, or use of imagery. This is apparent simply from looking at the front covers of each issue.
While the title of the publication remains constant on the covers, almost everything else varies
across the nine issues. The general organization of the page is consistent, with the title in a large
font at the top, with the month of publication and issue number underneath (except for issue nine,
where the issue number is under the picture). Issues one, two, three, four, six, and seven have the
issue’s table of contents underneath the title and issue number, then the place and year of
publication. Issues five, eight, and nine, however, have pictures in place of the table of contents,
forcing the table of contents inside the magazine. The first four issues have borders around the
page, the first three sharing the same design of vines and flowers, with the fourth transitioning
into a set of two simple lines. After the fourth issue, the borders disappear leaving more white
space around the title, contents, and cover art. The transition from the first to the last issue
required the loss of a lot of Korean magazine cover norms of the time, including lots of structure,
lines, borders, and order. By the last issue, the font is freer and less rigid, the constricting borders
are gone, a picture featuring what appears to be a wise man leading followers upwards, being
blown forward by the wind takes up the majority of the page. By this last issue, only the
language of the magazine immediately pinpoints the publication as being from East Asia.
The format of the text is another point of interest. Six out of nine covers feature both
horizontal and vertical writing orientations, all reading from right to left. While the writing is
mixed han’gǔl and Chinese characters, they opt to follow Classical Chinese writing orientation.
24
Thus, the binding of the book
is on the right and the
publication opens from the left
to the right. This seems
particularly important when
you look at the cover art from
issues eight and nine. Both
covers include drawings in
which a person is acting as
leader. In issue eight, a person
with a bird-topped scepter of sorts is
leading animals—a hen, a rooster, a
horse, and either chicks or mice—
towards the left side of the page, into the
text itself (Figure 5). The semi-circle on
the left side could also be the setting sun,
symbolizing the future and a march
towards that future, which lies within the
magazine’s pages. Issue nine, as
mentioned earlier, features an elderly
white-bearded man with a raised right arm grasping something stick-like, possibly a calligraphy
brush representing the man’s status as a scholar, in his left hand (Figure 6). This older man is
followed by an almost identical old man whose arms are not visible. In the background of the
picture are lines symbolizing the wind as it blows towards the left side of the page, again,
pushing these men into the pages of this issue. The terrain is an incline, an upward journey,
Figure 5: Cover art from Ch’angjo issue 8
Figure 6: Cover art from Ch’angjo issue 9
25
which could also be a symbol of advancement and progress. Combined with the works within the
covers of these issues, these two pictures beautifully illustrate a drive towards progress.
The image on the cover of the fifth
issue also makes interesting grounds for
analysis, given Ch’angjo’s mission to
create a modern Korean literature,
combining local custom and culture with
the global form of the little magazine. It
features a creature called a hyǒnmu (玄
武), one of the four mythical gods (sasin
四神) specific to the ancient Korean
tradition. The specific depiction used on
the cover of Ch’angjo issue five (Figure 7) is from a mural painted on the wall of the largest
Koguryǒ burial mound in the Kangsǒ region of P’yǒngannam-do (Figure 8). The hyǒnmu is both
male and female, and a combination of a turtle and a snake. The turtle’s head is female, while the
snake’s head is male. They are intertwined to depict the harmony between male and female. The
hyǒnmu also works with the three other mythical creatures painted in the Kangsǒ Daemyo to
show the harmony of nature. The hyǒnmu specifically is representative of north, winter, water,
blackness, and death (“Sasin (Sinhwa)” 2020). It is also associated with various winter
constellations. While we will go into more
depth on the topic of death in Chapter 4, it
is significant that of the four mythical
gods, they chose the hyǒnmu due to its
relationship with winter and death. It is
symbolic of an end, a break with the past.
Yet it is also significant that the symbol of
this break with the past is a traditional
Korean symbol, highlighting the seizing of
established Korean culture as part of the
platform on which they will build a new
nation. On the cover of a little magazine Figure 7: Cover art from Ch’angjo issue 5
Figure 8: A hyǒnmu from the inside of Kangsǒ Daemyo, a
mural filled Goguryǒ burial mound in P’yǒngannam-do
(“Sasindo (hyǒnmu)” 2020)
26
modeled after global forms and part of a global movement, this traditional symbol prepares the
readers for the mix of the global and local that will be found within the pages of Ch’angjo.
The covers also show development through the amount of colour used. From the first issue,
the title of the magazine, Ch’angjo (創造) is written from right to left in a different colour from
issue to issue, as if each title has been painted on the cover of the magazine, the title switches
between blue, green, black, red, and yellow throughout its run. Through the seventh issue, the
colour of the publication date is the same as that of the title. However, as with the inclusion of
cover art, as discussed above, the colour scheme of issues eight and nine changes as well. With
issues eight and nine, the title is printed in black, with the subtext that includes the publication
date and issue number is printed in red. On these final two issues, the cover art is also printed in
striking colour, particularly the bright red robes of the old men marching up hill. The constantly
changing colours, alongside the shifts in cover design from issue to issue demonstrate that the
members of the Ch’angjo literary coterie were dedicated to continual experimentation with the
forms they were working with. Even limited inclusions on the back covers were not consistent
throughout the nine-issue run.
The first four issues contain pretty standard advertisements for future issues of Ch’angjo on
their back covers. The back covers of issues
five and seven are mostly blank with only a
very narrow column of publication information
on issue seven. The sixth issue’s back cover
contains an advertisement for a publisher.
However, on the back cover of the final two
issues is an interesting mark—Figure 9. The
text inside of the two rings, starting at the top
and working clockwise, reads ㅊ ㅏ ㅇ ㅈ ㅗ ㄷ ㅗ ㅇ ㅣ ㄴ, which if put together into standard
Korean syllabic blocks would read 창조동인 or Ch’angjo Tongin (Ch’angjo
coterie) with the final silent ㅇ omitted. This is particularly interesting in
light of the various vernacularization movements and phonocentrism that
were de rigeur in East Asia at the time, which will be discusssed further in
Chapter 3. Writing the title out this way in Western form, from left to right,
grapheme by grapheme, removed from syllabic blocks, also appeared on the
Figure 10: Symbols found on the back covers of
issues 8 (left) and 9 (right).
Figure 9: The
Hexagram Qian
from the Book of
Changes
27
covers of many other little magazines, such as Kaebyǒk (開闢:1920-1926) and Tonggwang
(東光: 1926-1933) and was a common way that artists of the time signed their paintings.
Visually, even aside from the deconstructed han’gǔl, the symbol of a six-pointed star stands out
as intriguing. The hexagram can symbolize many things in many different cultures and religions.
In the form of a star, it is generally associated with Judaism and other Abrahamic religions, yet it
is also used in Dharmic religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. It usually represents
unity and balance as it shows the overlay of two triangles, one pointed up and one pointed down.
Some cultures and religions say it symbolizes the unity of man and woman, others say humanity
and God. However, if we look at its Confucian meaning, it can be another way to symbolize the
concept of dualism (yīnyáng) in all things. While not typically in the shape of a star, in the
Confucian philosophy of the Book of Changes (I Ching), the hexagram of 6 stacked horizontal
lines has the meaning of “Qian 乾 (The Creative)” (Figure 9). These six lines representing
creativity, rearranged can form the star-shaped hexagram, though it would be interesting if the
authors of Ch’angjo had chosen to both creatively deconstruct the han’gǔl and simultaneously
reconstruct the lines of qian into the six-pointed star. Either way, it seems more than coincidental
that Ch’angjo, meaning creation, would be accompanied by a symbol whose meaning can also be
construed as “the creative” within Confucian tradition, merely reconstructed in a common global
religious pattern showing again the interweaving of the local and global throughout the
construction of Ch’angjo.
By simply analyzing the covers of the nine issues of Ch’angjo the reader can observe the
changes that happened to the publication throughout its short lifespan. The uniformity of the first
three issues, all published in 1919, and their similarity to stylistic modes established by
preceding periodicals shows little experimentation with the visual form. Issues four through
seven, published in 1920, show more willingness to experiment, the floral-style borders
disappear and are replaced by a minimalist two-line border for issue four, and then are just done
away with altogether by issue five. In the fifth issue we also get our first cover art, and the table
of contents has been moved inside the magazine. On the covers of issues six and seven, the
creators opt for the same cover style, with the table of contents back on the cover, but the border
remaining absent. Between the publications of issues seven and eight, six months pass. While
there is a longer break between issues two and three, it is this six-month gap in which the visual
nature of Ch’angjo changes most noticeably. The table of contents is moved inside, the main
28
publication title is printed in black with subtitles in red and the striking colored pictures are
included with figures seemingly ushering the reader into the pages of the text and into the future.
The visual experimentation visible on the covers of each magazine, while not commensurate to
the literary innovation that was going on throughout all of the issues, shows an increased
willingness to try new things as each issue was published. If we compare Ch’angjo issue covers
to the covers of other magazines, we can see that it mirrors the development of other
publications. Hyun Shin Jo (2014), through an analysis of Korean magazine covers in the early
modern era, noted that during the enlightenment period designs started to emerge which have
affected even graphic design today. Some of the developments noted by Jo can also be seen in
Ch’angjo’s covers, notably the use of diverse Chinese typographies, the incorporated usage of
illustrations and other visual elements, and the use of red and green (159)—though Ch’angjo
also uses yellow and blue type on a couple of its covers. Comparing the covers of Ch’angjo with
the results of Jo’s analysis, we see that the development of Ch’angjo’s covers is a continuation of
the developmental path forged by other magazines during Korea’s enlightenment period. The
conservative nature of the first three issues contrasted with the striking covers from the final two
issues shows that the authors of Ch’angjo had first developed their craft along established
enlightenment lines and they then took more visual and stylistic liberties as the issues
progressed, participating in a design movement, the effects of which are still visible in modern
Korean cover designs.
29
Moving from the covers to the imagery of Ch’angjo’s internal pages, there are three
instances in which photographs of writers from the Ch’angjo coterie appear in the magazine.
These are included at the beginning of the final three issues. Issue seven includes a portrait of
Kim Tongin (Figure 11), issue eight contains a portrait of Chǒn Yǒng-t’aek (Figure 12), and
issue nine printed a portrait of Kim Hwan (Figure 13). These three authors represent three of the
four most prolific literary contributors to Ch’angjo’s issues. Only a portrait of Chu Yo-han is
missing. While the photo quality is not ideal, it is still immediately apparent that both Chǒn and
Kim Hwan are wearing Western-style suits for their portraits. All three men have short, modern
haircuts. Kim Tongin and Chǒn are staring piercingly into the camera, while Kim Hwan stares
just to the side of the camera’s lens. Chǒn and Kim Hwan sport subtle smiles, while Kim Tongin
opts for a straight-faced stare. Two of the three are also wearing glasses, a stylish accessory for
the modern man. Kim Tongin’s
portrait provides further matter for speculation. While it is a blurry image, it appears that instead
of the Western-style suit of his co-contributors, he is wearing white hanbok-style clothing. The
other two portraits are dark, with their collars, faces, and hands creating a picture out of the
negative space, yet Kim Tongin’s portrait is almost blindingly white, with the black ink of the
portrait working to let his likeness emerge from the page. In the bottom left corner of the photo
we also see what appears to be Kim Tongin’s signature. The signature is not in Chinese
characters, or the form of a seal as might have happened in earlier times, and it is also not in
han’gǔl as one might expect from one of the main contributors to a magazine of ‘pure’ literature
Figure 11: Photograph of Kim
Tongin from Ch’angjo issue 7 Figure 12: Portrait of Chǒn Yǒng-
t’aek from Ch’angjo issue 8
Figure 13: Photograph of Kim
Hwan from Ch'angjo issue 9
30
written predominately in han’gǔl. Rather, the signature is in the Roman alphabet and ordered in
the Western manner of writing names, with the surname last, “Tong In Kim”. This demonstrates
not only Kim’s knowledge of the Roman alphabet, but also familiarity with Western name order.
He is even able to sign his name in cursive rather than print. Yet, at the same time, his style of
dress and the whiteness of the photo6 asserts a continuous adherence to the Korean custom, even
as he adopts various modern styles in his name, writing, and modes of thought. In Kim Tongin’s
photo alone, the mission of Ch’angjo is represented, a melding together of Western forms and
Korean customs. His image emerges from the white background, clad in customary white,
staring directly into the camera as it captures his likeness. As with all the previously discussed
imagery, these photos show the authors’ comfort operating within Western-style modernity, but,
particularly in the case of Kim Tongin, incorporated into the
context of Korea.
Korean culture is further emphasized in the few illustrations
scattered throughout the issues of Ch’angjo. One of the first
images to appear within its pages is an illustration of a decorated
folding fan with a flowered vine winding up the page (Figure 14).
It appears in the second issue of the magazine at the end of a piece
of prose by Kim Hwan—under his nom de plume Baek Ak—
titled “Kohyang ǔi kil” (“The Road Home”), which is an
autobiographical piece describing Kim’s feelings of returning to
his hometown after having been absent at school in Japan for a
long time. At first glance, the illustration may seem like just a
pretty drawing of flowers with a typical East Asian fan, but on
closer inspection, the flowers appear to be mugunghwa, or rose of
Sharon—the national flower of the modern-day Republic of
Korea—with links to the Korean cultural tradition as far back as
Silla during the three kingdoms period (57 BCE-935 CE). Thus,
6 Another name for the Korean people is baek ǔi minjok, or “the white-clad people”, thus the choice of white as the
predominate colour in the photo is culturally significant as well.
Figure 14: Image from Kim
Hwan’s “Kohyang ǔi kil”,
Ch’angjo issue 2
31
even a simple sketch of flowers and a fan work alongside Kim Hwan’s invocations of hometown
nostalgia to create links between the modern and innovative written forms and Korean culture.
These culturally-specific elements alongside newly introduced modern styles and vernacular
writing can also be seen in other images present in proceeding issues, including a sketch of a
woman in hanbok in issue nine on the inner title page. In the same position in issue eight, is
printed a ceramic vase (Figure 15), which strikes the reader as a piece of traditional pottery.
However, on closer inspection, the style of the vase is not wholly Korean, or even completely
East Asian. Its shape looks similar to either a hydria style vase from the Greek ceramics tradition
or a ceramic imitation of a Chinese hu ritual drinking vessel, as the hanging rings on the sides are
more common in East Asian vessels. The engravings on the vase, however, are somewhat
reminiscent of Greek and Roman traditions, with frolicking donkeys reminiscent of a
bacchanalian scene, and the overall symmetry of the surface. Thus, the
vase itself seems to be a melding together of global and local forms,
and just to truly ground it as local, unlike the cover art, the
photographs of the authors, or the sketches of the mugunghwa and
woman in hanbok, this vase appears to be printed using woodblock
printing, or at least emulating that traditional style. This is another
instance of the visual forms of Ch’angjo intentionally localizing the
global, bringing in the global form of a Greek-esque vase, and printing
it using local styles and methods.
The visual forms contained in Ch’angjo, including page layouts, type faces, and images,
show the coterie’s willingness to experiment with forms and try new things as they worked to
reinvent Korean literature. They also show the interplay between global and local forms. By
using photographs and illustrations each with Korean cultural components, by innovating with
cover ideas while including contextually Korean elements depicting movement forward towards
progress, its visual components exemplify the assertion that Ch’angjo’s mission was to localize
the global form and incorporate new methods and modes all the while asserting the concept of
the modern Korean. This is present not only in the visual material forms, but also in the written
material forms, specifically in poetry.
2.2. Poetic Forms
Figure 15: picture of a vase
printed in Ch’angjo issue 8
32
The poetic form was another place of material innovation embraced by the authors of
Ch’angjo and by Chu Yo-han in particular. Chu Yo-han is recognized by some as a founder of
modern Korean poetry yet criticized by others for also adhering to established forms in some of
his poems. Kim Ji-sun (2011) asserted that Chu was attempting to bring the level of Korean
poetry up to the standard of the global poetic form while still maintaining the essence of Korea
through the use of Sijo and folk poetry style (323). Because of his mixing of new and established
styles, he is sometimes seen as both an innovator and a revivalist, simultaneously. This duality of
Chu’s poetic style is apparent from looking at Chu’s contributions to Ch’angjo, in particular,
Chu’s Ch’angjo poems: “Pulnori” (Fireworks) and “Pyǒl mit e honja sǒ” (Alone Under the
Stars).
Chu Yo-han’s first poem, and the very first piece in the first issue of Ch’angjo, is a prose
poem entitled “Pulnori” (Fireworks). Chu, well known for being part of the movement in Korean
poetry to break free from long-established poetic tropes and try more experimental poetry,
attempts such a thing through “Pulnori”, easily his most stylistically innovative poem in
Ch’angjo. In breaking with established Korean poetic style, Chu also opted not to turn to
standard European poetic form as an alternative, preferring to experiment with the lesser known
prose poem, a style that had been popularized in the 19th Century by various French and German
poets, most notably Baudelaire. According to Edward Hirsch, “the prose poem takes advantage
of its hybrid nature — it avails itself of the elements of prose (what Dryden called ‘the other
harmony of prose’) while foregrounding the devices of poetry” (2014, 489). This style of poem,
therefore, acts as a sort of hybrid between poetry and prose, abandoning the stereotypical verse
structure of poetry and opting for a freer, more prose-like, paragraph structure, while still
eschewing standardized sentence structure and punctuation. The content is also more of a hybrid
than purely poetry or prose. Prose poetry incorporates the images and descriptiveness of poetry,
yet the flow of the subject seems more strictly connected and often somewhat conversational in
tone as you would find in a work of prose.
Chu Yo-han’s “Pulnori” fits this description of a prose poem quite well. To an extent, it
even mirrors what Hirsch (2014) quotes the poet Russel Edson as saying, that he “always
sought… ‘a poetry freed from the definition of poetry, and a prose free of the necessities of
fiction’” (490). As Chu led the movement to re-invent Korean poetry, his experimentations with
form and content display a desire to be freed from the definition of poetry, yet not so much as to
33
become fiction. I don’t think it’s an accident that the very first poem that was published on the
very first page of Ch’angjo is one that breaks so much with established Korean poetry, as well as
with standard Western poetic forms. Following this poem, the remainder of Chu’s poems return
to a verse format, yet “Pulnori” stands as a clear break between culturally established poetic
forms and the ‘pure’ literature that Ch’angjo purports to offer and sets the stage for the other
prose poems included in Ch’angjo—which are mostly translations.
In the final issue of Ch’angjo, Chu Yo-han published his poem “Pyǒl mit e honja sǒ” or
“Alone under the stars”. This poem is interesting to examine, especially next to his first work
“Pulnori”. Structurally they have very little in common. “Pulnori” is a prose poem that doesn’t
utilize lines or verses, whereas the form of “Pyǒl mit e honja sǒ” conforms to more typical poetic
verse standards. “Pyǒl mit e honja sǒ” reads almost like a song, with verses and a repeating
chorus between each verse. In fact, the poem’s narrator is singing a song—which is what the
‘chorus’ portion of the poem is. This poem shows a reversion to a more Sijo style, as Sijo poetry
was often very rhythmic and meant to be sung. Sijo—a Korean poetic form with a long
tradition—was typically much shorter in length than Chu’s poem, but if you look at just the
chorus, or the song that is being sung by the poem’s lamenting narrator, it can be taken for sijo
itself.
“The river water flows, flows, as I have taken on the years
For him whom I left atop the mountain, I have shed not one tear
The river water flows, flows, as I have taken on the years.”
(Chu, 19217)
This chorus repeats three times in the poem, with only the middle line changing each time.
With Sijo, poems were composed of three lines, and were often sung by kisaeng8 or by the
scholars who had composed them. This sung chorus, marked even within the poem as being sung
as the narrator notes “I sing, alone, a plaintive song” in the first verse, shows how Chu was
attempting to take established Korean forms and incorporate them into his vision for modern
7 All translations are my own unless otherwise stated
8 Kisaeng were women, either orphaned or of low birth, who were well versed in music and arts. Their vocation was
to entertain noblemen through art, music, and conversation.
34
Korean poetry. While the two poems diverge in form, their many thematic similarities such as
death, loss, nature, and hope connect them. Thus, though the form of Chu’s poetry changes
dramatically between the first and last issues of Ch’angjo, thematically, his poems continue to
invoke similar sentiments and undertones, always trying to end on a hopeful note in his attempts
to refrain “from falling into the decadent mood of the times” (Kim 1994, 18). The Ch’angjo
poems also highlight representations of the poetic self, and notions of poetic subjectivity.
Chu’s shifting poetic form, Ch’angjo’s use of images including photographs and cover art,
the changing type faces, and experimentations with type orientation to create grids and artistic
layouts, are all examples of this forward press to incorporate modern forms into Korean
literature, interweaving them into landscapes of Korean culture. This is exemplified in the coterie
members’ maintaining syllabic structure and vertical type orientation while at the same time
opting for a morpho-phonemic orthography, including photographs of authors with some in
Western dress and others in the emblematic white Korean dress, and incorporating illustrations
and printed visual art next to the written word in order to emphasize their joint presence in the
aesthetic sphere. All of these material steps operate to show that Ch’angjo, while working to
place Korean literature on a global level, did so oftentimes by translating the global into the
local.
35
The Korean language in Ch’angjo
After peeling off Ch’angjo’s material layer, one of the things that is immediately exposed
is the language being used. Ch’angjo was published during a great transition in Korean writing
and was in fact instrumental in cementing these linguistic changes within modern Korean
literature. At this time, most professional writers were writing in the Japanese language and
publishing in publications printed under the authority and approval of the Japanese imperial
government. While other Korean language publications existed, Ch’angjo prided itself that all its
pieces were written in Korean, with no contributors writing in Japanese or Classical Chinese.
While its works still contain a lot of Sino-Korean characters (hanja), the grammatical structure
follows Korean syntactic patterns as opposed to those of Classical Chinese. Ch’angjo was by no
means the only magazine written in Korean at the time, but the numbers were low. Furthermore,
the works of Ch’angjo, in purporting to be modern literature, not based on Chinese models and
written in the Korean language, also incorporated elements of the Western European and Russian
examples that the authors took to be the epitome of ‘pure’ literature. This incorporation could
only be accomplished using a phonetic writing system that more closely paralleled spoken
language. This movement towards phonetic orthographies began long before Ch’angjo. In Japan,
in the latter half of the 19th Century, following the Meiji restoration, a new conception of writing
emerged known as genbun itchi—which is often translated as a unification of written and spoken
language. Karatani (1993) writes that “Genbun itchi represented the invention of a new
conception of writing as equivalent with speech” (39). Now this widely held conception was not
completely accurate, as speaking and writing are intrinsically different modes of communication
and therefore can never be truly equivalent, but one lasting effect of genbun itchi was an
emergent phonocentrism, further encouraged by the Western presence. Among some groups in
China, Japan, and Korea, this led to movements for the adoption of the Roman alphabet, but on
the Korean peninsula, which already had the advantage of an existing fully formed morpho-
phonemic orthography in the form of han’gǔl, the adoption thereof for literary purposes was
quickly agreed to, particularly by nationalist groups bent on establishing a firm concept of Korea
through its cultural difference from other East Asian nations.
This chapter investigates the linguistic innovation and experimentation that the authors
undertook in Ch’angjo, building off these vernacularization movements and the widespread
36
adoption of han’gǔl in Korean publications. The pieces in this publication demonstrate the early
effects of an accelerated period of growth and development in written Korean that took place
between the “early modern Korean” of the late Chosǒn period and the “contemporary Korean”
that is now in wide use. In the first part of the chapter, we look at the orthographies used in
Ch’angjo and their patterns across the different genres. We then turn to the effects of the East
Asian vernacularization movements on Ch’angjo as well as its contributions to efforts to
standardize written Korean. Finally, we analyze Ch’angjo as a translingual conduit which helped
further establish newly imported terms and ideas within the Korean semiotic repertoire.
3.1. Orthographic choice and distribution
Prior to Chu Si-gyǒng’s coinage of the name han’gǔl (the writing of the Han) in 1913, the
Korean orthography, created by King Sejong and his scholars in the 15th Century, was referred to
as ǒnmun (vernacular/vulgar writing). Up until the end of the Chosǒn Dynasty, scholars wrote
exclusively in Classical Chinese and left ǒnmun to the women and peasants. However, in the late
19th Century, following their release from obligations to China through the Treaty of
Shimonoseki, many Korean scholars and political activists embraced ǒnmun to express a sense
of nationhood separate from the Chinese tradition. One of the first publications to adopt ǒnmun
was the Independence Club newspaper, Tongnip Sinmun, which ran from April 1896 to
December 1899; many others followed suit. In 1917, Yi Kwang-su’s Mujǒng became the first
modern Korean novel, as it was published entirely in han’gǔl and utilized many new stylistic
methods, and in 1919, Ch’angjo declared itself to be the first literary coterie magazine of ‘pure’
literature, adopting wide—though not exclusive—use of han’gǔl in all pieces published. A
mixture of han’gǔl, Sino-Korean characters, and Roman letters are used in Ch’angjo.
In general, most of the writing is written vertically, being read from top to bottom and
moving right to left, as was typical of both Classical Chinese and Japanese writing. However,
there is also variation in the writing orientation and the positions of the writing on the page
depending on whether what is being presented is a literary piece, an advertisement, or an
organizational page, such as the title page, table of contents, and portrait page. As mentioned in
the previous section on materiality, advertisements often changed the orientation of words and
phrases to create visual variation and effect, often in the form of a grid. Cover pages also shift
between horizontal and vertical writing, but are always read right to left, with the spine of the
37
magazine itself being on the right, as was standard for all Chinese, Japanese, and Korean
literature at the time. Even within the literature there is slight variation on text layout based on
genre. The majority of the literary pieces in the earlier issues are structured with two sections on
each page—see Figure 18—following the page layout style of other contemporary Korean
magazines from the late 1910s, like Yǒjagye (Women’s World) and Hakchigwang (Lux
Scientiae). However, there are some pieces that utilize different text flows by dividing the page
into three sections—generally poetry as in Figure 16—or printing the text in one long section,
letting the vertical text extend from the top to the bottom of the page—see figure 17. The choice
of text flow seems to be somewhat arbitrary. Particularly if you consider Figures 17 and 18,
which are two sections of the same novel. The portion of “Oh the frail-hearted” from issue five is
split into two sections, whereas the continuation of the same novel in issue six is all combined
into one long section per page. However, it is noteworthy that as the issues progressed, more and
more prose pieces are published in the single section per page format, demonstrating that perhaps
it was an innovative choice made by some of the authors as they experimented with new styles in
both writing and formatting. This tendency towards single sections is echoed in other
publications that were being published in 1920 and 1921 such as Hyǒndae (The present era) and
Figure 18: First page of Kim
Tongin's novel "Oh the frail-
hearted" from Ch'angjo issue 5,
text divided into two sections per
page.
Figure 16: Kim Chong-sik's
poetry "Nangin ǔi pom" from
Ch'angjo issue 5, text divided
into three parts per page.
Figure 17: First page of part II of
Kim Tongin’s novel “Oh the frail-
hearted” from Ch’angjo issue 6.
All text in one section per page.
38
Sǒul (The Seoul), as well as slightly later publications like Sinyǒsǒng (New Women). Even the
aforementioned Hakchigwang (Lux Scientiae) eventually started printing many of their pieces in
full-paged sections, though not until the latter half of the decade. The shifting writing layout of
Ch’angjo in the later issues is therefore indicative of a shift in writing layout as a whole in
Korean writing during the early 1920s.
While the writing format in Ch’angjo typically followed established patterns, its
orthographic choice of using a mixed script that tended to be more heavily han’gǔl, was one
factor helping to secure its place among the foundational publications of modern Korean
literature. As seen in the pages of Ch’angjo, during this innovative period, a lot of literature was
written in mixed script with more Chinese characters found in certain genres than in others. For
example, in Ch’angjo’s very first piece, Pulnori (Fireworks), Chu Yo-han’s prose poem, in the
first paragraph only three Sino-Korean characters are used. However, in Chǒn Yǒng-t’aek’s
essay “Complaints”, the first paragraph includes 20 characters. Both first paragraphs are of
similar lengths, but the non-fiction genre shows a tendency towards increased character usage
that stays true across other pieces in the publication as well. The main difference lies in content
words—words that convey meaning rather than structure, predominately nouns, verbs, and
adjectives. In works of poetry and fiction, the style tends to be more informal, with words
selected to resemble the spoken vernacular more closely, as the authors tended to adhere to
vernacularization movement norms in these two genres. As such, many of the content words are
native Korean words and therefore do not have associated Chinese characters. Many fiction
writers also simply opted not to use any characters for words whose meaning could not be
confused in the given context, and only used characters for clarification purposes—as Yi Kwang-
su did in the inaugural modern Korean novel Mujǒng. The non-fiction categories of essay,
critique, travel writing, etc. employ a more scholarly register. They are not written in Classical
Chinese, as the syntax and use of morphology are unmistakably Korean, however, many of the
content words lean towards the academic and are therefore more likely to be Sino-Korean words
with associated Chinese characters. One of the main modern critiques of Ch’angjo is associated
with this use of mixed script or kukhanmunch’e. Ch’angjo is intended to be a work of modern
Korean literature, written on behalf of the Korean people or kungmin, yet its use of mixed script
makes it incomprehensible to those who are not versed in both han’gǔl and Sino-Korean
characters, notably women, children, and farmers (Kwŏn 2012, 152). Thus, the orthographic
39
choices made by Ch’angjo’s authors limited its readership to “a small number of literary-minded
individuals” (Lee 2015, 82). This paradoxical orthographic use which continued the historical
privileging of the educated elite exemplifies this moment in Korean literature’s transition to
han’gǔl, a moment in which the idea of a Korean script was still very much in flux, and very
inclusive of ‘non-Korean’ elements.
Han’gǔl and Chinese characters are not the only orthographies found in the pages of
Ch’angjo. Sometimes what at first appears to be Sino-Korean characters are actually Sino-
Japanese characters acquired by the authors through either the influence of Japanese Imperial
authority on the Korean peninsula or through the authors’ Tokyo-based higher education.
Though less common, the Roman alphabet is also scattered through some pieces published in
issues of the magazine. The first instance that we see of the use of the Roman alphabet is in the
first issue within the first page of Kim Tongin’s novel “Yakhan cha ǔi sǔlp’ǔm” (“Sorrow of the
weak”). The main character Elizabeth is going to visit a friend and must pass through certain
places in Seoul, rather than naming the places, Kim writes “…N 通, K 町 等을 지나서…”,
which roughly translates as “passing through N street, K town, etc…” (Kim 1919, 53). This nine-
syllable phrase is interesting on both orthographic and etymological levels. Orthographically
speaking, without combined knowledge of han’gǔl, the Roman alphabet, Sino-Korean characters
(hanja), and Sino-Japanese characters (kanji), it becomes incomprehensible. N and K are Roman
letters standing in for the names of places, censored to avoid geographic specificity as is
common in Western European literature, particularly during the 19th Century. The first two
characters 通 and 町 are characters for street and town, pronounced t’ong and chǒng respectively
in Korean. Yet, they are more closely associated with the Japanese tsu (through) and machi
(town), most likely the influence of Japanese colonialism on urban layouts and the author’s
Japanese education. The third character 等, if read as deng taking the Chinese meaning of the
character, means ‘wait’. However, in Japanese it can be used as a plural marker ra. When used in
a Korean context, it can pronounced as either dǔng or dǔl, closer to the Chinese pronunciation,
but semantically its meaning is closer to the Japanese, meaning something akin to ‘et cetera’ with
the first pronunciation and the Korean plural marker if it’s the second. The han’gǔl particle 을
(ǔl) marks the grammatical object, and 지나서 (chinasǒ) is the verb indicating movement
through the previously expressed nameless street and town. With these nine syllables we see the
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multiplicity of linguistic influences working on Korean writing during this time, another
indication of the globality that is being localized in Korean literature at various structural levels.
In this simple phrase we see the influence of the West through the use of Roman letters, along
with the typically 19th century European Romantic practice of avoiding geographic specificity,
yet this influence is interwoven with markers of the Japanese occupation and historical remnants
of a long history of Chinese influence. All of these different orthographies, however, are placed
within the Korean grammatical structure, marked with a Korean particle and ended by a Korean
verb. This is indicative of the process that the authors have pioneered in Ch’angjo as a whole.
Pieces and influences from global sources are woven into the existing tapestry of Korean
language and culture.
Another interesting piece for orthographic analysis is Kim Hwan’s “Misullon” (“Theory of
art”). It is split into two parts across issues four and five. In the first half of his theoretical work,
he elucidates his theory of the great meaning of art, broken down into 13 parts. For the first few
pages, he follows the standard structure adhered to by most of the other contributors who write
essays, critiques, or travel literature using Chinese characters predominantly for content words
and han’gǔl to convey function words—words that provide syntactic structure to an utterance,
generally prepositions, case markers, conjunctions, etc. However, in the fourth section of his
theorizing, entitled “Misul kwa chayǒn” (Art and nature), we suddenly encounter the word
“inspiration” written in the Roman alphabet in the middle of a mixed script sentence, with the
Sino-Korean character given in parentheses after the English word. Throughout the rest of this
first part and into the second, Kim Hwan continues to intersperse Roman letters, English words,
and names of various scholars, writers, and artists written in the Roman alphabet throughout his
theory of art. The multilevel organizational headings in the second part of Kim Hwan’s “Theory
of Art” essays even utilizes a mixed orthography with the first level using the order of the
han’gǔl graphemes (가, 나, 다…) and the second level using capitalized Roman letters (A, B,
C…). The insertion of words and names in the Roman alphabet adds another layer of complexity
above the incorporation of a simple letter. The orientation of languages written in the Roman
script is quite different from that of Korean. Han’gǔl was specifically designed by King Sejong
and his scholars to work in conjunction with Chinese characters, but not with the Roman script.
At the time of Ch’angjo’s publication, written Korean was still oriented vertically, read top to
bottom, moving from right to left, while the Roman script is written horizontally moving from
41
left to write. The solution used by Kim Hwan was to turn the roman-scripted word 90 degrees
clockwise so that it aligned vertically, but still technically read from left to right. This allowed
the words to fit in line with the surrounding han’gǔl and Sino-Korean characters, while
maintaining its legibility for those who were able to read the Roman alphabet, further
incorporating foreign orthographic influence into established local form.
Kim Hwan, in his elucidations on the history of art and its role in various facets of life,
science, and civilization, necessarily includes influential names like Diego Rodriguez de Silva y
Velasquez, Leonardo da Vinci, Aristotle, Albrecht Durer, G.W. Friedrich Hegel, Charles Le
Brun, etc. In the text, the majority of these names are listed using standard East Asian name
order, with the surname preceding the remaining name(s). However, Leonardo da Vinci is listed
with Leonardo coming first. Capitalization, spelling, and spacing are also sometimes flawed
ignored or misused. Spanish artist Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez is cited as “Velasquez,
Diego Rodriguez desilva Y.”, French artist Charles Le Brun is named as “Le Brun charles”,
Albrecht Dürer is “Dürer, Arbrecht” and in part 11 of his first essay, we encounter the word
‘Doricorder’, referring to Doric order, one of the three Greek architectural orders. This is not a
criticism of Kim Hwan’s ability to utilize the Roman alphabet to the standard subscribed to by
each individual European language, but rather to point out the relative novelty of inserting
Roman-written words and names into Korean writing. Kim Hwan’s use of these names is not
merely listing them as examples of artists, but rather he quotes many of them, including Hegel
and Dürer as he sets out his theory of art. He is also operating not just among English names and
patterns, but trying to incorporate Spanish, French, German, Italian, Romanized Greek, and more
into a single orthographic structure. Also, at this point in time, the knowledge that Kim Hwan
had obtained through studying these European figures, was very new to Korean scholarly
writing. Therefore, there was no standard way to write these names in han’gǔl, nor were there
familiar Sino-Korean characters associated with their names. Even today, with decades of
linguistic interactions between English and Korean, there are debates about how to han’gǔlize
various English sounds with no direct Korean equivalents. Kim Hwan and the other authors of
the period would have had to make decisions how to transliterate these names based on both their
limited knowledge of all of the European languages from whence they came and the existing
Japanese transliterations of these same names, which may ultimately have opened them up to
more censure from other scholars of the time. While Kim Hwan opted to simply write the
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Roman-alphabet names, in the ninth issue, an author with the pen name ‘Kim Chǒk—possibly
Im Chang-hwa—in his essay “Myoyak” (Elixir), opted to both han’gǔlize the Roman names and
include the original names in parentheses after the name. Other names that do not originate from
languages that utilize the Roman alphabet, like Turgenev and Tagore, are generally only found in
han’gǔl. Another method of han’gǔlization is seen in Kim Tongin’s “Oh the frail-hearted!”
through the transliteration of the English word ‘coffee’ as “커—피—” (k’o—p’i—), with
accompanying diacritic strokes to the right of each syllable to signify it as a foreign borrowing.
This mimics the transliteration style of Japanese, in which ‘coffee’ is transliterated as “コーヒ
ー” with the two long dashes symbolizing elongated vowels, an orthographic borrowing from
Japanese that was eventually phased out in Korean. This is indicative, as Lydia Liu elaborates in
her book Translingual Practice (1995), of the role of Japanese as a conduit through which new
vocabulary and language flowed into Chinese and Korean, while some new words required the
assignment of new meaning and nuance to existent terms, others required transliteration. Kim
Tongin and his fellow Korean authors took these transliterations as models for han’gǔlization as
they adapted phonetically and orthographically foreign words and concepts into Korean written
structure.
The pages of Ch’angjo show the ambivalent nature of orthographic choice during this time
in Korean writing. While most of the writers who contributed to Ch’angjo were also supporters
of and participants in the independence movements, they recognized that it was impossible to
express what they wanted to express by limiting themselves to only the Korean portion of their
semiotic repertoire. As those who were born and raised on the Korean peninsula, educated in
Japan, and familiar with art, literature, and social theory coming into Japan from around the
world, they needed to be able to translanguage in order to fully express their ideas (Liu 1995).
This translingual practice was not limited to their syntactic and lexical choices but extended into
to their orthographic choices as well. The variety and versatility of orthography in Ch’angjo may
seem odd given that it was to be a vehicle for the creation of modern Korean literature. With this
in mind, however, it is interesting to note that in using various orthographies from both East and
West, the mission of the authors was not to make the Korean language fit the orthographic
structure of the languages of origin, but rather to take this world of orthographies and reposition,
transliterate, and adapt them until they fit into the Korean linguistic mold, forming yet another
example of the localization of global forms in this little magazine.
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3.2. Korean vernacularization and standardization
The vernacularization movements that swept through Korean, Chinese, and Japanese
literature in the early 20th century were not attempts to simply write as they spoke, as the word
‘vernacular’ might imply. In East Asia, vernacularization partially ties back into orthographic
choice, as to East Asian writers, vernacularization was the unification of the written and the
spoken. Chinese characters, as an ideographic script rather than a morpho-phonemic script,
allowed the conveyance of meaning, but this meaning didn’t have any intrinsic phonetic link to
the verbal representations of these ideas within the thoughts and languages of the writers. A
poem written in Classical Chinese could be understood in Qing China, Chosǒn Korea, and Meiji
Japan, but it would not be read the same way. Writer Futabatei Shimei wrote of the need to
vernacularize, “how pathetic that writing alone should have its cheeks crammed full of stiff,
mold-sprouting gobbledygook, or a mouth dripping from drool from learning to speak with an
immature tongue” (Futabatei in Levy 2006, 23). In this characterization, written language, not
being representative of smooth, spoken language, was stiff and immature. Thus, written language
and spoken language needed unification in order to expand and rejuvenate the written word and
authors’ abilities of “expression”. “Before this time, no one spoke of literature in terms of
expression. It was the identification of writing with speech which made such a concept possible”
(Karatani 1993, 40). By advocating for a form of writing which allowed the phonetic expression
of the author’s language, the ability to write as expression came about, though, as demonstrated
in the previous section the identification of written Korean with spoken Korean was never fully
realized in practice, as was also ultimately the case in China and Japan. In China, just a few years
before the publication of Ch’angjo, the first of two major alphabetization movements began.
This “Chinese Romanization movement” was a prime example of the phonocentrism that was
gripping East Asia during the time that Ch’angjo came into being (Zhong, 2019). With China
losing faith in its own ideographic writing system, Korean and Japanese writers were sure to do
the same, aided by China’s weakening cultural grip on East Asia and the rise in European
influence. According to Karatani (1993), what was taking place at the time “was not the actual
abandonment of Chinese writing but rather a profound undermining of the privileged status of
writing (as kanji), which was accomplished through advocating an ideology of phonetic speech”
(51). The vernacularization movement had this widespread effect in both Korea and Japan, and
44
to a certain extent in China itself, of restructuring the orthographic hierarchy to privilege more
phonetically based graphemes.
Karatani traces the origins of the genbun itchi movement and other literary innovations in
Meiji Japan to the movement to reform drama, and specifically to the actions of the actor
Ichikawa Danjūrō, whose innovative techniques set him apart from other actors of the time. Most
notably, he “stopped applying powder to his face in the exaggerated manner of the traditional
theater and he resuscitated patterns of ordinary speech” (Karatani 1993, 55). This initial instance
of stripping away adornment and ornamentation allowed audiences to see the ‘real’. This same
thing applied to speech and writing, by stripping away the traditional adornment of Chinese
characters and literary stylistic devices, the remnant, the vernacular script, in bearing a phonetic
resemblance to actual speech, evoked feelings of authenticity.
“Once a phonocentric ideology of language had been adopted, however, even
when kanji were used, their meaning was subordinated to sound. Similarly, the
conception of the face came to be that of the naked face as a kind of phonetic
cipher, meaning was then constituted as an inner voice recorded and expressed
by the face. The Japanese discovery of realism and interiority was thus
profoundly linked to the genbun itchi movement.” (Karatani 1993, 57)
This sense of realism and interiority was then passed down to other generations of writers.
By the time Kim Tongin, Chu Yo-han, Kim Hwan and Chǒn Yǒng-t’aek became acquainted
during their time studying in Japan, much of Japanese literature had already embraced the
concept of genbun itchi, therefore in their studies of literature, these Korean writers would
necessarily have encountered the concept and allowed it to inspire and evoke a sense of
authenticity in their own writing. That Korean writers in Japan adopted this prevailing attitude of
phonocentrism in their own works is especially apparent in Yi Kwang-su’s Mujǒng (1917). Yi
writes almost entirely in han’gǔl, yet when he does employ Sino-Korean characters for meaning
clarification, the han’gǔl rendering of those characters is given first with the characters
themselves being relegated to parentheses following the han’gǔl—e.g. “김장로의 딸 선형(善
馨)이가” (Yi 1917)—thereby privileging the phonetic script over the Sino-Korean characters
even when they are present in the prose. The authors of Ch’angjo did not all follow this pattern,
though many did, and for those who opted not to give the han’gǔl equivalents of Sino-Korean
45
characters, the syntactic structure and use of grammatical function words written in han’gǔl still
worked to vernacularize their writing to a more phonocentric style.
As mentioned in the previous chapter there is an image at the end of the last two issues of
Ch’angjo which contains han’gǔl deconstructed from its typical
syllabic blocks—Figure 19. Read clockwise starting at the top, the
graphemes spell out ㅊ ㅏ ㅇ ㅈ ㅗ ㄷ ㅗ ㅇ ㅣ ㄴ (ch’ a ng j o t o ng
i n), or Ch’angjo Tongin, which is the name of the literary coterie
formed by the contributors to Ch’angjo. From a vernacularization
standpoint, the most notable thing about this construction is the
omission of the silent ‘ㅇ’ in front of the ‘ㅣ’, which would be
impossible in the syllabic block form of standard Korean. In Korean, the ‘ㅇ’ grapheme
represents the ‘ng’ nasal sound when placed at the end of a syllabic block. However, when a
syllable begins in a vowel, the ‘ㅇ’ grapheme is merely a place holder, a zero consonant, used to
fill out the syllable. As the ‘ng’ sound cannot be made at the beginning of a syllable, it is always
clear within a written syllable whether it is the ‘ng’ sound or the zero consonant. In the symbol
on the back of issues eight and nine, this silent ‘ㅇ’ was omitted, and the word written out
grapheme by grapheme without any imitation of the form of Sino-Korean characters. The
spelling of Ch’angjo Tongin in this manner utilizes the phonemic level of the han’gǔl, without
making it compatible with Sino-Korean characters as was and is typically standard.
Orthographic choice and vernacular style vary from piece to piece within the pages of
Ch’angjo highlighting this time period as one in which the standardization of written Korean as a
legitimate form of literary and scholarly expression was in its early days. Various standardization
movements at both public and government levels took place throughout the rest of the colonial
period and into the first few decades of division, and while not all of the experimental techniques
tried within the pages of Ch’angjo were adopted as standard across written Korean, some of the
innovations tried in Ch’angjo and other contemporary publications had a permanent impact on
the standardization of written Korean.
The spelling conventions in Ch’angjo highlight its place in the transition between early
modern Korean and modern Korean. There are many instances where words are written exactly
as spoken rather than being confined to the spelling conventions that are now firmly fixed in
Figure 19: Seal on the
back of Ch’angjo issue 8
46
Korea. For example, in many pieces in Ch’angjo, you will find the modern Korean word 같이
(kat’-i) written as ‘가치’ (ka-ch’i) following its phonetic pronunciation, and ‘없다’ (ǒps-ta)
written as ‘업다’ (ǒp-ta) without the silent ‘ㅅ’ (s). Re-syllabification which in contemporary
standard Korean takes place in pronunciation rather than in conventional spelling, is often
demonstrated through spelling in Ch’angjo—e.g. you will find ‘잇스며’ (is-sǔ-myǒ) rather than
‘있으며’ (iss-ǔ-myǒ) in Choe Sǔng-man’s “Pulp’yǒng” and ‘미테’ (mi-t’e) rather than ‘밑에’
(mit’-e) in Chu Yo-han’s “Pyǒl mit’e honja sǒ”. It can therefore be said that through the
influence of the vernacularization movements, Korean writing at this time may have been closer
to spoken pronunciation than the standard conventions that were eventually agreed upon after the
vernacularization movements waned. The authors, in utilizing a phonetic orthography strove to
fully adapt Korean writing to their own local pronunciation. It is beyond the scope of the present
thesis, but it would be interesting to analyze the spelling conventions of each individual author to
see if there are dialectal agreements between the spellings used by groups of authors from similar
areas. Demonstrable patterns of this would provide even stronger evidence for a strict adherence
to the idea of phonetic representation as vernacular. As the majority of the authors are from
P’yǒngan province, evidence of their dialect can already be seen in word choices scattered
throughout the magazine—e.g. 얼그망이 (ǒlgǔmangi), P’yǒngan dialect for 얼금뱅이
(ǒlgǔmbaengi, a person with a weathered face), is used in Chu Yo-han’s “Pyǒl mit’e honja sǒ”,
and ‘머구리’ (mǒguri), a common northern word for 개구리 (kaeguri, frog) is used in Kim
Tongin’s “Sorrow of the weak”. It would stand to reason that if they were truly adhering to
phonetic representations, any pronunciation differences would also assert themselves between
the group of authors from P’yǒngan and the much smaller group of authors from the Seoul area.
Beyond orthographic and spelling conventions, however, syntactic patterns also begin to emerge
in the works of Ch’angjo.
Kim Tongin’s writing is notable, as previously mentioned, for its use of plain-formal style.
The complex Korean verb system includes both honorifics and different speech styles. While
many other pieces printed in Ch’angjo opted to use formal deferential style—also referred to as
high formal style—in Kim’s works, the narrative is told predominately through the use of plain
formal style (haerach’e)—sometimes referred to as low formal style (Im, Hong, & Chang 2010,
73). However, Kim Tongin did not innovate the use of this style in his novels’. Yi Kwang-su also
47
famously opted for this style in Mujǒng (Heartless), which had been published two years prior to
the publication of Ch’angjo’s first issue. This trend of losing honorifics and deference in writing
style was also happening simultaneously in early modern Japanese literature as part of the
genbun itchi movement. Both Japanese and Korean are languages where the ending of the verb is
determined by both the subject of the sentence and the relationship between the speaker and
listener. While Kim and those who followed a similar style of writing opted for a low/plain
speech style, they still chose formal over informal. This pattern has remained up to the present,
with most authors opting for this plain formal style in their prose, whether it be fiction or non-
fiction.
This linguistic shift was indicative of a much larger social shift occurring simultaneously.
Following the end of the Chosǒn Dynasty and the beginnings of the conception of Korea as a
modern nation-state, there came a dismantling of the established social hierarchy. The
vernacularization movement in Japan is said to have begun at the urging of American Christian
missionaries to abandon Chinese characters in favor of more accessible writing. According to an
1866 petition to the Tokugawa Shogunate written by Maejima Hisoka, the abandonment of
Chinese characters would allow education to be more accessible to all realms of society
(Karatani 1993, 45). This ideology in which education should be more widely available also
entered Korea as the established social hierarchy was breaking down. The introduction of new
modern social orders necessitated new language use to be able to describe this new order.
According to Yi Kwang-su, “a novel portrays an aspect of life in a refined and righteous manner.
It depicts its author’s imaginative world as clearly as possible so that its readers can perceive the
world realistically”9 (Yi 2011, 303). In order to accurately reflect the changing social hierarchy,
it was necessary for authors to change the language they were using, specifically the language
that was intrinsically linked to the previously adhered-to social structure, namely honorific levels
and formal verb endings. It is useful to remember, as Karatani pointed out, that vernacularization
was not really an alignment of speech and writing as is often touted, but rather a privileging of
phonocentric orthography (Karatani, 1993, 47). The vernacularization movement did not change
the written style of Korean, Japanese, or Chinese languages to reflect the ways in which people
9 Translation by Jooyeon Rhee
48
were speaking, as in spoken Japanese and Korean, variations of tone, formality, and style were
still heavily influenced by social relations and therefore are constantly changing in any given
speech act. Rather, in a narrative without a strict social hierarchy between writer and reader,
these changes based on relationship did not occur, and therefore one consistent speech level
could be utilized throughout the text. While informal speech endings became standard, generally
the changes in writing during vernacularization were more focused on the fronting of phonology
rather than on accurate representation of spoken syntax and lexical forms.
Zur (2017) echoes Kwŏn (2012) in asserting that the use of new verb endings as well as
new narrative points of view served their purpose of establishing new modes of literature. These
new structural components created “a space of interiority by distancing the narrator from the
objects of his narration” (Zur 2017, 195), thereby constructing a narrative space in which the
subject could be realized. Zur also asserts that these efforts to standardize the use of the Korean
vernacular were intended to play on the emotions of the readers as well, “the ultimate ambition
was to create an awakened national subject. Thus, at the dawn of modern Korean literature, the
bond between language, literature, and the nation was forged” (195). The efforts to standardise
the use of vernacular Korean through writing in predominately han’gǔl and utilizing new verb
and pronoun structures was the Korean response to the influx of phonocentrism in East Asia, yet
while the impetus may have been inspired by the West, the result was a localised Korean
subjectivity.
3.3. Ch’angjo as translingual conduit
We have discussed how the Korean writers of Ch’angjo, along with their contemporaries,
worked to localize global linguistic forms at both the phonetic and syntactic levels, as they used
language to create a national subjectivity that was both part of a global literary movement and
simultaneously qualitatively Korean. This same localization happened at the lexical level. Lydia
Liu (1995) analyzes this time period in East Asia, specifically through the lens of China,
indicating it as a time when translanguaging was rife. New concepts and ideas were entering into
literary and scholarly conversation, yet there were often no established ways to express these
ideas in Japanese, Korean, or Chinese. As many of these terms were disseminated throughout
East Asia through Japan. Often these lexical gaps were filled by Japanese writers and scholars
who had re-purposed existing words, usually Sino-derived words with related meanings, to
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indicate the new concepts entering into their semantic repertoires. Korean writers took the
established repurposed Sino-Japanese forms and re-translated them into Korean literature and
scholarship.
Yi Kwang-su’s 1916 essay “What is Literature? (Munhak iran hao)” was written to analyze
one of these terms, munhak (文學). From the very beginning of the essay he seeks to
differentiate the present use and meaning of the term ‘munhak’ from its historical use and
meaning which referred mainly to the study of Chinese Confucian classics. He attributes the shift
in meaning of Sino-derived terms to the vernacularization movements, which ultimately opened
up the meaning of what qualified as literature and laid the groundwork for the establishment of a
new literature, which, according to Yi, “must be written in the purely contemporary everyday
vernacular, which can be understood and used by anyone” (2011, 306)10. The new ideology,
which required the repurposing of existing language, helped to generate further experimentation
and innovation with language leading to a modernization of language and consequently
literature. “Translingual practices, such as translations, adaptations, and appropriations, including
the generalization across East Asia of the translated term munhak, were a necessary state in this
process of modernization” (Hwang 1999, 8). The modernization inspired by translingual terms
was not limited to just literature. These translingual practices required the re-negotiation of
meaning for many Sino-Korean words in order to incorporate modern Western-inspired ideas.
Liu (1995) asserts that these re-borrowings can fall into three categories: (1) words consisting of
two-character combinations that were unique to premodern Japanese and not previously a part of
the Classical Chinese lexicon—e.g. 宗教 chonggyo/religion, (2) Classical Chinese expressions
with renegotiated meanings that then returned to their source language imbued with new
ideology—e.g. 經濟 kyǒngje/economy, and (3) character combinations from modern Japanese
that had no Classical Chinese equivalent—e.g. 美學 mihak/aesthetics—(32-33). As Korean
writing followed the Classical Chinese standard fairly strictly prior to vernacularization, it can be
assumed that their borrowings followed the same pattern and were therefore absorbed/re-
absorbed into the Korean lexicon in similar ways.
10 Translation by Jooyeon Rhee
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Translingual terms were instrumental in literary movements across East Asia. Liu (1995)
states that “there are, in the history of texts, texts which are occurrences” (33). She uses this to
introduce the renegotiation of 國民性 (guominxing—kungminsǒng in Korean) to take on the
meaning of “national character” within the Chinese language, through the medium of Japan. She
cites this translingual readjustment of meaning as a catalytic event that sparked the “invention of
modern Chinese literature itself” (33). Levy (2006) asserts that the concept of modern literature
in Japan started from the translation of the Western concept of literature, through the reinvention
of the term bungaku (文学) away from “the study of written documents…the study of rhetoric
and the Confucian classics” towards the Western sense of the word “as a category of the arts that
included poetry drama, and fiction” (27). She further contends that the bloom of modern
literature was secondarily influenced by the influx of translations of literature from various
Western languages. Korean literature seems to have followed a similar pattern, and based on Yi
Kwang-su’s essay “What is Literature”, followed by many of the theoretical works included in
the pages of Ch’angjo, it would seem that in the history of Korean literature, the texts which can
be taken as “occurrences” are those which elucidate new ideas of munhak (literature) and yesul
(art)—munye for short—as foundational in establishing nation and national culture. Such
theorizing is scattered throughout the pages of Ch’angjo. In the second issue, Ch’oe Sǔng-man,
in his essay “Rǔnesangsǔ” (Renaissance), asserts the supremacy of European art and the
necessity for Korean art and literature to undergo its own renaissance—note he doesn’t propose
that Korean writers and artists copy these supposedly superior European styles, but rather that
they should have their own renaissance that allows them to rediscover and redevelop within their
own local framework in order to measure up to what Ch’oe sees of art and literature in Europe.
Kim Hwan, in his two-part theory on art “Misullon”, discusses many of these concepts
introduced through translingual lexical renegotiation. Linguistically it is interesting to note that
in the section headings, when he utilizes Sino-Korean characters whose meaning has been
redefined, they are demarcated by small circles placed to the right of each character. These
words include misul (art), chayǒn (nature), isangp’a (idealists), sasilp’a (realists), kwahak
(science), chinbo (progress), and segyeǒ (global language). Ch’oe Sǔng-man and No Cha-yǒng
also analyse this new idea of literature and art in their respective essays “Munye e taehan
chapkam” (“Impressions on literature and art”, issue four) and “Munye esǒ muǒt ǔl
kuhanǔn’ga” (“What are we looking to find in literature and art”, issue six). Many other works in
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Ch’angjo follow this same vein as the writers frame themselves as artists, and following the title
of their publication, participate in the act of creation (Lee 2015). Inspired by these new ideas,
this act of creation involves a new concept of Korean literature, through which the authors hope
to be a part of the renaissance that Ch’oe Sǔng-man asserts is necessary for the realization of a
Korean literature worthy of the global stage.
The renegotiations of meaning that took place during this time period, were instrumental in
introducing concepts of subjectivity, interiority, and nationality to the Koreans who encountered
them. Through the written works of these authors, these terms were then diffused via little
magazines and newspapers throughout the peninsula, and they eventually trickled down to be
used through all levels of society, illustrating Liu’s point that “the patterns of diffusion
sometimes prove to be just as decisive as the moment of invention” (1995, 35). The re-borrowed
words such as “kungminsǒng” (國民性, national character), “kukka” (國家, nation), “kukche”
(國際, international), “injong” (人種, ethnicity), “munhwa” (文化, culture), etc. helped to create
a sense of nationhood among the Korean people. Other terms like “munhak” (文學, literature),
“misul” (美術, art), “ch’ǒlhak” (哲學, philosophy), etc., once they embodied the European
enlightenment ideas they had been repurposed to contain, created new categories within which
writers and artists could operate, asserting their uniquely Korean language and culture though
universally recognized forms of art and literature. These global terms, combined with
orthographic and syntactic innovations, once adopted and adapted served to create a local sense
of the Korean nation, people, and spirit.
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Ch’angjo as Creation
Once the material layers of the visual and the linguistic have been pulled away, the literary
semantic layer remains. What is being written in Ch’angjo? What topics are dealt with, and how
are they discussed? Ultimately does the content dealt with in Ch’angjo reflect the authors’
mission of building a Korean literature that can stand unashamedly alongside other global
literatures? The name Ch’angjo is significant in that it is implicative of the creative intent of its
founders when they brought it into being. They aimed for creation, but not just creation in the
sense of creativity, rather they were using art and literature—which they often equate—as a
platform of construction. Through the creation of this new literature, published in a little
magazine and adapting forms and themes from global literatures, their ultimate goal was the
creation of an idea of Korea as a nation, not an extension of China or Japan, but an independent
culture and people whose literature was grounded in local language, culture, and tradition, but
simultaneously ideologically cosmopolitan, progressive, and global.
Ch’angjo was a stage for the writers’ self-development. Lee Jaeyon (2015) asserts that the
little magazines that appeared around this time were “a platform for inexperienced writers with
literary aspirations, and that this medium helped to shape the figure of a literary writer” (78). The
writers of Ch’angjo were just beginning their literary careers. Even Yi Kwang-su, who had
already written Mujǒng at this point, still had a vast career in front of him in which to develop
and hone his style and craft. Kim Tongin and Chu Yo-han were both only 18 years old when the
first issue was published. All of the writers in the various coteries worked together, accumulating
ideas of what they thought modern Korean literature should be, to set the groundwork for their
future selves as well as generations of Korean writers who came after them.
It is difficult to categorize all of the pieces contained within the nine issues of Ch’angjo
into a single historical periodization or style of literature, such as Romanticism, Realism,
Modernism, Naturalism, etc.. Elements of all can be seen interwoven through the pieces as the
authors creatively reinvent Korean literature. Lee (2015) wrote that in Korea in the early 1920s,
“would-be writers ushered in many different kinds of modern literary trends available in
translation at virtually the same time and were unable to establish a general consensus about
what constituted ‘good’ literature and what literature ‘should’ be” (80). Along with this ushering
in of translated literary trends, the conception of what characters would be like in modern Korean
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literature also required innovation. The authors did not start from scratch, however, and
according to Yang Yoon Sun, “The images of individuals in the Korean short stories from the
late 1910s and early 1920s should be viewed as manifestations of ‘translated modernity’” (2018,
424). These forms, though translated from the authors’ exposure to other national literatures,
were still new to Korean literature, but as Bulson asserts “modernism itself was always bound up
with the production of literature that would, at the time it was consumed, seem strange, shocking,
unfamiliar” (2017, 65). Through vernacularization as well, these new modes of expression were
possible, including the concept of expression itself. As mentioned in the previous chapter, for
Japanese literature, “it was the identification of writing with speech which made such a concept
possible” (Karatani 1993, 40). Thus, while in other places, little magazines were pushing the
boundaries of Realism, Romanticism, and other established forms of literature, Korea writers’
experimentation with these imported styles was their own mode of innovation and pushing the
boundaries of what had been considered Korean literature up to that point.
Ch’angjo’s contents were not limited to short novels and poetry, though those genres do
make up the majority of the works contained within its pages. Issues also include plays, travel
writing, literary criticism and appreciation pieces, as well as essays and translations. Each form
shows innovation from past versions of the same forms, not just through the orthography and
choice of written formal/informal style as discussed in the previous chapter, but also through the
authors’ choices of topics, words, allusions, figurative language, character names, and narratorial
point of view. It is also important to note that while much innovation did happen, the works
within Ch’angjo were not a clean break from past literature. There are authorial choices made
throughout the texts that still harkened back to literary styles of earlier times. This combination
of established styles based on Korean literature through to the end of the Chosǒn dynasty and
stylistic innovation based on the new forms and ideas that the authors had encountered during
their educations abroad in Japan helped to set the foundations for Ch’angjo as a literary
magazine that is localized to the Korean situation, yet globally connected to the little magazine
movement through its innovations and use of forms and literary styles aspiring to universality.
Many scholars have shown how this was a time period where the ‘self’ was discovered in
East Asian literature. Karatani talks of this time in Japanese literature as the discovery of
interiority. “The familiar naked (“realistic”) face that emerged at this time as something that
conveyed meaning, and that meaning—to be precise—was ‘interiority.’ Interiority was not
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something that had always existed, but only appeared as the result of the inversion of a semiotic
constellation […] now they had to search for meaning ‘behind’ the actor’s ordinary face and
gestures” (Karatani 1993, 57). This inward turn, the origins of which Karatani attributes to shifts
in Japanese dramatic performance, went on to affect literature through the genbun itchi
movement. These shifts were necessarily encountered by burgeoning Korean literary figures as
they studied abroad, and this sense of interiority and self is evident in their writing. Lee (2015)
discussed the keywords used by authors throughout Ch’angjo that highlight their new
conceptions of Romantic individualism—self (cha), individuality, life, spirituality, by
themselves—as well as the need for enlightenment through doing things for oneself, as
elucidated in Ch’oe Sǔng-man’s “Renaissance”. Lee (2015) also discussed Kim Tongin’s essay
about individualism in the act of creation entitled “Chagi ǔi ch’angjohan segye” (“The world
created by the self”). In her 1996 work Narrating the Self, Tomi Suzuki describes the paradigm
shift that happened in Japanese literature during this literary moment when narration in Japanese
literature began to take on the form of the self and the expression thereof, which affected similar
shifts in Korean writing as well. Kwǒn Podǔrae’s Hanguk kǔndae sosǒl ǔi kiwǒn (The origin of
the modern Korean novel), discusses this discovery of ‘ego’ (chaa) and interiority
(Naemyǒnsǒng) specifically in reference to the foundations of Korean literature in the time
period leading up to the publication of Ch’angjo, showing that the scene had already been set for
the individuality and self-exploration when the contributors of Ch’angjo set their pens to paper
(Kwǒn 2012). Thus, the developing notion of the self is a demonstrable innovation undertaken
by the authors of Ch’angjo and their contemporaries alongside other innovations that translated
globality into their local context.
In this chapter, we look at three major concepts that are present and interwoven throughout
the fiction, poetry, and essays contained in Ch’angjo: Romanticism, Modernism, and gender
archetypes. First, we look at how Korean writers interwove their localized literature with notions
of European Romanticism, particularly with themes of death, nature, and the aforementioned
concept of Romantic individualism. Then, we turn to what makes Ch’angjo modern, what sets it
apart from its literary predecessors, and what elements of the authors’ encounters with ‘the
modern’ can be seen within their works. Finally, we look at female character archetypes at this
moment in modern Korean literature. Though not exhaustive, through an analysis of the
Ch’angjo coterie’s treatment of these Romantic, modern, and gender-related topics, we can see
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the ways in which they took the global forms that they encountered through translation in Japan,
re-translated and re-wrote them into a specifically Korean context.
4.1. Romanticism
The novel as we currently conceive of it was still a relatively new form in Korean literature
at the time of Ch’angjo’s publication. Thus, it had yet to become part of literature’s natural
scene. Writing a novel was still a very deliberate act and the writers themselves were still
experimenting with different methods to find a natural novel form for Korean literature. In Kim
Tongin’s two best-known works from Ch’angjo, “Sorrow of the Weak” and “Oh the Frail-
Hearted!”, the main characters both explicitly compare themselves and their experiences to the
works of novels, giving the characters a sense of meta-awareness of their roles as characters in
an actual novel. In “Oh the Frail-Hearted!”, the main character talks about novels either to
compare the drama of his life to novels, or to analyze and critique the conceptions of the novel as
being a form of literature that seems to always revolve around love and marriage. The
protagonist ‘K’ reports a conversation he had with ‘C’, in which ‘C’ explains the current state of
Korean literature and the novel. ‘C’ states,
“ ‘Of course, there is nothing we can call literature. However, if you designate
them as literature, the so-called creations that we have now are drivel. Why are
the novels that we call novels all used as weapons of advocacy for love and
marriage? Because, like a bamboo shoot just emerging in a bamboo grove, these
novels are just editorials advocating for love and marriage, it seems that maybe
in our country, these things are considered literary novels.
“The reason for this is that when someone first applied to their work the name
‘literary novel’, it was actually just a popular novel. However, because some
creative works were all about the problem of marriage, society became addicted.
So now, even though there are occasionally people who write about different
problems, the meanness of the concepts, the narrow grasp of the scope of the
backgrounds—a problem of substance—the childishness of the descriptions, are
all truly sickening.’ ”
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“I heard what he said and answered that I felt the same. It was somewhat
dissatisfying. It was like he had said everything I wanted to say. It’s not that I
hadn’t also noticed flaws in novels before this, but because I hadn’t known
precisely what kind of flaws they were, I pretended not to notice.”
(Kim Tongin 1920, 42)
This derisive critique of the general public conception of the novel as something merely
about love and marriage highlights the author’s desire to re-direct the trajectory of the modern
novel to be about more than just love and marriage, and while it may comprise this theme, other
more important themed should be fronted. Kim, through the voice of ‘C’, notes that Korean
literature is in its infantile state, a mere bamboo shoot sprouting in a bamboo grove. Thus, in
these formative years, Kim’s novels, as well as the novels and poetry contributed by other
authors in Ch’angjo are driven by larger themes than love and marriage—though these themes
also feature in repurposed ways. Most characters ultimately find themselves on the path to
enlightenment, and the themes they encounter along the way help to lead them there—be they
love, marriage, death, nature, or any combination thereof. In this section we investigate three
major Romantic themes that help lead these characters to their moments of epiphany on their
journey towards enlightenment: death, nature, and Romantic notions of the self.
First let us look at the role of death. Death is a common Romantic theme, and one that
haunts the pages of Ch’angjo. In most of the prose fiction and even much of the poetry, the
characters either encounter death or have been affected by a death that occurs outside of the
narrative. Death in Romantic literature often acts as a turning point, a moment of awakening
after something else comes to an end. In Ch’angjo, this overarching theme of death symbolizes
many things, particularly ends and beginnings as its works are the writings of a group trying to
innovate a new national literature under the shadows of colonialism. The authors, through the
creation of a new literature are carefully manicuring a literature that intertwines elements of the
literary past and elements of Korean culture with newly encountered forms. This necessitates a
clear cut, a separation from the past through the imagery of death and emergence therefrom. In
many of the pieces that discuss death, the death is not of the main character or narrator of the
piece, but of an important adjacent character whose death has a profound effect on the
protagonist, an awakening and enlightening effect.
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Some of the more notable deaths throughout the issues are the death of Elizabeth’s unborn
fetus in “Yakhanja ǔi sǔlp’ǔm” (Sorrow of the Weak), the death of the narrator’s wife and son in
“Maǔm i yǒt’ǔnja yǒ” (Oh the Frail Hearted!), the death of the student Ch’il-sǒng in “Ch’ǒnch’i?
Ch’ǒnjae” (Idiot? Genius?), the death of the fisherman’s wife in “Paettaragi” (Boat Song), and
the death of a person referred to only as ‘nim’ accompanied by an overall sense of death and
sadness in Chu Yo-han’s poem “Pyǒl mit e honja sǒ” (Alone under the Stars). Each death is a
turning point in the story leading to a great change in each of the protagonists, even in the case of
Chu’s poem, where the death happens outside of the poem, but its effects reach throughout. In
this section however, we will focus on the death of Ch’il-sǒng in “Idiot? Genius?” and the death
of the wife in “Boat Song” as these deaths both exemplify the treatment and meaning of death
throughout the other pieces of literature in Ch’angjo.
The theme of death in “Idiot? Genius?” runs throughout the story. Chǒn Yǒng-t’aek
heavily foreshadows the death of the narrator’s student Ch’il-sǒng so that by the time it happens,
the only thing that is mildly surprising is the protagonist’s reaction. From the very moment the
main character sets foot in his boarding room in the headmaster’s home, he talks of the ghosts
that he can sense there of someone who has hanged himself or frozen to death. He eventually
learns the story of Ch’il-sǒng’s father, who like Ch’il-sǒng’s grandfather had drank and drugged
himself to death into an early grave. As Ch’il-sǒng’s father and grandfather both died young, the
reader is led to expect that Ch’il-sǒng will follow suit. The reader has thus been primed to know
that Ch’il-sǒng will die young, and they have also been primed regarding the means of his death,
as the narrator sensed the ghost of someone who had frozen to death from the moment he set foot
in his new lodgings. The title of the novel is referring to the character of Ch’il-sǒng. There are
elements of both idiocy and genius encapsulated in his character. He struggles to learn in the
formal classroom and is constantly abused by his classmates, teachers, and uncle—who is the
headmaster. He loves to take things apart and see how they work, but he is constantly thwarted in
this by authority figures. In the final lines of “Idiot? Genius?”, the narrator comments, as he
mourns the loss of Ch’il-sǒng, that at least now he is free. Death has set him free from the
beatings and restrictions and now he might do as he pleases. This comment offers hope that
when one thing ends, freedom will follow. This commentary on freedom is not surprising from a
participant in the 1919 independence movements. Ch’il-sǒng’s death is the symbolic death of a
past in which society was constrained and forced to operate within a system not built for their
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cultural genius, and the freedom that the narrator hopes for Ch’il-sǒng is the same freedom that
Chǒn hopes for the Korean people. After Ch’il-sǒng’s death the narrator leaves the school to
escape the haunting memories and guilt left by Ch’il-sǒng, but he has been permanently affected
and shaped by his encounter with this student and he moves forward a different and seemingly
improved, enlightened man following this turning point, just as Chǒn hopes the Korean people
can move on, not forgetting their past, but choosing progress rather than sitting in stagnation.
Death in Kim Tongin’s “Paettaragi” (“Boat Song”) revolves around the embedded narrative
of the old fisherman, to whom the narrator is drawn when he hears the man singing a plaintive
boat song, a song that brings back nostalgic memories of a summer spent in a village on the coast
of the Yellow Sea. The narrator finds the old man sitting atop Kija’s tomb11 and hears the man’s
sad life story. His wife was pretty, and he was a jealous husband who beat her all the time
because he constantly thought she was flirting with other men. Finally, he caught her and his
brother in what looked like a compromising position and accused them of an affair. They said
they were only in that position because they had been trying to catch a mouse, which he
eventually found out to be true, but only after he had beaten his wife and chased her from his
home. He discovered her bloated corpse the next day on the seashore and never had the chance to
apologise to her. His brother left town in anger, and the old man then became a travelling
fisherman who, at the point he meets the narrator, has been searching for his brother for 20 years
but can’t manage to find him. Prior to the death of his wife, the fisherman’s life had been a
repetition of fishing, drinking, jealous fits, and beating his wife. However, the death of the wife
inspired change in both brothers. The younger brother left, and the older brother followed,
constantly searching for his brother, a symbol of his home and people, just as the Korean people
are searching for their home and national character. As of the end of “Boat Song”, the fisherman
hasn’t found his brother, just as the idea of an independent Korea has yet to be realized. Like the
fisherman searching for himself through the image of his brother, the Korean people are still
searching for sovereignty, yet the story lives on in the sense of longing that continues with the
narrative long after he and the fisherman part ways.
11 A landmark in P’yǒngyang that supposedly houses the remains of Kija, a relative of the rulers of China’s Shang
Dynasty and supposed first ruler of Kija Chosǒn (11th Century BCE) in the northern part of the Korean peninsula.
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The setting in which the narrator hears this story is also important. He hears the story of the
fisherman in spring12, amid the celebrations of a boat festival, contrasting the sad remembrances
of the past with the blossoming spring of the present. It is also significant that the man is singing
atop Kija’s tomb. Spring is a symbol of reawakening and the narrator is closely associated with
spring, whereas the fisherman is a symbol of tradition and death and he is perched atop the tomb
of a ruler who strongly links Korean historical beginnings with Shang Chinese origins, not a link
that was popular during this period of the culturally-independent sovereign Korean state. Thus,
the fisherman and his air of death lie atop a history from which Kim Tongin hopes to separate the
new Korea, its culture, and its literature.
Not only is death a theme in fiction and poetry, but it also features in some of the essays. In
Ch’oe Sǔngman’s “Pulp’yǒng” death is defined as a lack of complaints, or those who are content
with their current state. Ch’oe asserts that it is death for a person or a society to be free of
complaints, while simultaneously setting up having excessive complaints as the catalyst of
progress. Setting up this opposition of death and progress shows that one of the Ch’angjo
authors’ uses of death was to create a contrast between progress and contentment with custom
and the past. In each piece, the deaths are something to be mourned momentarily, just as the loss
of national sovereignty and other aspects of the Korean past can be mourned, but ultimately each
piece ends with a sense of hope, renewal, discovery, and progress. In “Sorrow of the Weak”
Elizabeth realizes her own weakness and uses that knowledge as the foundation of her new
determination to be strong. In “Boat Song”, the death of the fisherman’s wife is the catalyst
needed to send him to the ocean, learning new skills and going new places as he seeks to find
and make amends with his estranged brother. After the death of Ch’il-sung in “Idiot? Genius?”,
the main character discovers his own sense of guilt in the boy’s death and he comes to
understand the world and his part in it in a different way. Based on these examples, death in the
pages of Ch’angjo is a turning point, a moment that ushers in enlightenment, an end of
stagnation and a beginning of freedom and progress, a catalyst that pushes the protagonists
12 Spring is another common theme throughout Ch’angjo. This symbol of rebirth after winter is the theme of
numerous poems, prose, and translations.
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towards self-realization and progress. The common Romantic theme of death is thus utilized in a
way that asserts Korean nationhood and cultural independence.
A lot of the deaths in Ch’angjo are accompanied by images of nature. Ch’il-sǒng freezes
under a tree, the fisherman’s wife is found drowned on the seashore. In “Oh the frail-hearted!”,
K’s wife’s madness leads her halfway up a mountain where she is found unconscious and her
illness soon culminates in her death. Much Romantic literature contains a return to nature.
Karatani’s (1993) writings on the discovery of landscape in the beginnings of modern Japanese
literature, talked about the introduction of descriptive prose and verse on the background of a
scene. Prior to this, there was no concept of landscape or descriptions of nature as it generally is.
Literature that dealt with natural wonders instead focused on using stylized language to describe
famous places, usually in travel literature (Karatani 1993, 52). However, this new focus on the
natural background to all life allowed for more Romantic description of natural backgrounds, not
just those famous landmarks that lyrical poetry had dwelt on for centuries. Just as in a painting,
the painting’s subject is visible against a background, in early colonial Korean literature, through
description, the settings in which characters are operating come into view. But the concept of
nature as used in early 20th century literature was an imported one. Before the term chayǒn was
re-imported into Korean with the Western nominal meaning of ‘nature’ through the translingual
practices of the early 20th century, it was already widely used in Korea. According to Kwŏn
(2001), prior to the change in meaning, chayǒn was used in the adjectival sense, to mean natural,
“it was not confined to the limits of any specified existence” (389), it simply meant “by itself, or
naturally without the application of human power” (389). However, following the introduction of
the Western concept of nature, used as a noun, the use of the word chayǒn changed in Korean
literature, also affecting the way in which writers and artists viewed the worlds they were
depicting. Kwŏn (2001) notes that the introduction of the Western idea of nature led to new
imaginations of the non-human world. Nature became an entity in its own right, with its own will
and power. Kwŏn gives examples from Yi Kwang-su’s Mujǒng in which nature is described as
cold-hearted and strict (390). As authors digested this new concept of literature, it manifested
itself in their works as another god-like character set in opposition to humanity.
Nature, as this god-like entity looming in the background, plays a large role in personal
development and individual character growth in Chǒn Yǒng-t’aek’s “Idiot? Genius?”. The very
first sentence of the story reads “Even before I became an adult, there was nothing I hadn’t tried;
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I had done everything”. This confident protagonist, finding himself without work, is forced to
take up a position as a teacher in a school in a small village next to a mountain. At this school,
the protagonist’s character development is driven by moments in nature. He first meets his
student Ch’il-sǒng atop the mountain behind the headmaster’s home. He discovers that Ch’il-
sǒng is not actually an idiot during an encounter in the woods where the boy is singing as
beautifully as an angel, and ultimately the body of Ch’il-sǒng is discovered under a willow tree
along the road to P’yǒngyang. All of these moments where the protagonist’s perceptions of
Ch’il-sǒng and ultimately himself and his own intelligence and subjectivity are called into
question in nature. Chǒn is clearly experimenting with the newly introduced concept of nature as
a powerful foil to humanity, yet the entity of nature is elicited through descriptions of a typical
Korean mountain and wooded area. The author is therefore imbuing the local natural geography
with an intangible power.
Chu Yo-han’s “Pyǒl mit e honja sǒ” (“Alone under the stars”) is almost completely driven
by landscape description. In this 27-line poem, water is mentioned 18 times, stars 7 times, and
other characteristics of the natural background like the forest, sand, mountains, etc. fill the lines.
The narrator is lying in his boat under the stars, being rocked by the waves, the flow of the water,
representing the flow of time, the coming night representing the end of an era, are rushing the
narrator away from his hometown and darkening his view of his peers, his wife, his own flesh
and blood. The past is trying to grasp him through its song, the river’s flowing water and the
wind are holding his life’s breath. The water is calling him, calling on him to say something, to
sing his plaintive song, his song of the past that slips into the night. The final stanza of his sijo-
style song describes an old man with a weathered face falling into the cold hands of the water
and meeting his end. Just like in Yi Kwang-su’s Mujǒng, the nature described in “Pyǒl mit e
honja sǒ” is harsh and cruel, rushing the narrator into the dark night, demanding that he sing a
song through which the past is swept into the darkness, and the old weathered man, representing
outdated tradition, is pulled under the water to his death by the river’s cold hands. Just as in
Chǒn’s work, we can see that Chu also incorporated the Western sense of nature into his poem.
The entity of nature is a powerful opposition to the narrator who lies in his boat helpless against
the currents of nature. The depictions of nature as seen in both Chǒn’s and Chu’s works would
not have been conceivable prior to the discovery of landscape and the integration of the Western
concept of nature as a noun that works in opposition to humanity. The discovery of landscape
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and the characterization of nature in opposition to humanity required the simultaneous discovery
of subjectivity. To notice one’s background is to notice oneself as separate from the surrounding
environment. The idea of individuality, or the self as “a single example of a group” or “the
fundamental order of being” (Williams 1983 163), which had emerged in European literature
roughly a century earlier, saw its importation into East Asian literature in the late 19th and early
20th centuries. But as Yang (2017) has observed, the individual in Korean literature is very
different to its European counterpart, both in its inception and in its execution. The individual
became part of Korean literature in the transitional phase of early modern Korean literature. It
was fashioned after the European model, but it is not simply a duplication thereof. According to
Yang, “Certainly the power of Western influence was evident in Korean literary texts during this
period. Korean writers did develop new types of characters inspired by the European notion of
the individual—but not as mere imitators. They were addressing issues unique to their social and
cultural context, issues that mattered to them and their readers” (2017, 5). These unique issues
are evident both in the landscape being described, but also in the symbolism of the subjectivity
and the landscape and background that the subject is being depicted against. The unique socio-
cultural context of the Korean peninsula under Japanese colonialism, in the midst of widespread
independence movements, is reflected in the Korean subjectivity portrayed within the issues of
Ch’angjo. The translingual practices that injected new ideology into existing language enabled
Korean authors to discover their own subjectivity and create a literature unique to their kukka
(nation) and munhwa (culture) as subjects in opposition to other groups’ kukka and munhwa, as
well as to chayǒn (nature).
As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, the discovery of ‘self’ in early modern
Korean literature has been the focus of many literary scholars over the past few decades, as such
we will only briefly look into it here. This sense of ‘self’ and Romantic interiority is immediately
apparent in the fiction and poetry in Ch’angjo. The narrator of Chu Yo-han’s “Pulnori”
(“Fireworks”) establishes a sense of interiority and a sense of the self within the first stanza, as
the narrator of this prose poem laments his isolation from the people around him. “Today is the
eighth day of the fourth lunar month, Buddha’s birthday, and though I hear the sounds of people
like flowing water on the main road, why is it that, among this roar of celebration, I alone am
unable to stem the tide of tears in my heart,” he declares (Chu 1919). These lines are the second
half of the first paragraph of the first piece of literature published in the first issue of Ch’angjo
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and already we see a sense of aloneness, separation from others, and we find out about this
separation from the inner thoughts of the narrator. The poem ends with this same sense of ‘self’
separate from others, “Oh, oh, don’t let go of the present, which is your assured thing. Oh, oh,
live, live! Tonight! Your red torch, your red lips, your eyes, and also your red tears……….”
Here at the end of the poem as well, the narrator is urging the youth to live for the present,
though tomorrow itself is a guarantee, it is not a guarantee for the youth, who must therefore
seize the moment and live for the moment and themselves. These youth are representative of the
Korean people, most likely those who took part in the 1919 independence movements. Chu, who
was one of these youths, is seizing upon the subjectivity of the Korean people and calling them
to action to ensure their own tomorrow, to live. This sentiment is echoed in No Chayǒng’s essay
“Munye esǒ muǒt ǔl kuhanǔn’ga” (“What to look for in art and literature” 1920), in which he
asserts that an artist’s role is to portray the vitality of an individual. According to Lee (2015), by
representing the vitality of individual characters, the vitality will be able to be communicated to
others. Through this vitality and subjectivity of the individual, the vitality and subjectivity of the
nation can also be asserted.
At the time of Ch’angjo’s inception, the introduction of both nature and subjectivity into
Korean literature was quite new, and therefore was not treated the same way by all authors. Kim
Tongin, in various essays and stories also had much to say concerning the ‘self’, and his
characters displayed his experiments with portraying interiority in each of his pieces. In his essay
“Saram ǔi sanǔn ch’am moyang” (“The true shape of a person’s living”), he declares that vitality
can be found through the process of creation and is therefore not found in nature. In Kim
Tongin’s works, the vitality (saengmyǒng) of the artist, “can only be obtained through the hands
of men and represented by their work” (Lee 2015, 88). This shows a large break from Kim
Hwan’s assertions in his “Yesullon 1” (“Theory of Art 1”) that truth and life, and consequently
vitality, are found in nature. Kim Tongin’s notion that vitality comes through one’s own process
of creation is evident in his works. In “Sorrow of the Weak”, especially in the beginning,
Elizabeth shows very little strength of character, and as far as the story describes her, she has not
been actively involved in the process of building something with her own hands or intellect. At
the end of the story, however, Elizabeth’s realization that true strength and joy comes from the
individual’s pursuit of true love in a way redeems her character as she makes a vow to actively
make “this love the foundation of her future path,” rather than continuing to let things happen
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passively to her. This echoes the subjectivity encouraged by Chu Yo-han in “Pulnori” to seize
the moment and progress as an individual, whether it be an individual person or an individual
nation.
Just as with the previous translated ideologies that the writers of Ch’angjo wove into their
writings, they used this newly introduced notion of subjectivity to connect themselves and their
works to the global community, but they did so by establishing themselves as members of a
localized national community. The Romantic themes of death, nature, and subjectivity all
worked together within Ch’angjo’s little magazine format and its contemporary publications to
cement the foundations of an emergent Korean national subjectivity. These innovations in
Korean literature when accompanied by other newly encountered modern themes and technology
helped the authors move forward with the creation of their own artistic subjectivity.
4.2. Modernism
In describing modernism as a philosophical concept, Peter Osborne wrote that modernism
is “the name for the cultural affirmation of a particular temporal logic of negation (‘the new’, the
temporal logic of modern), modernism is the cultural condition of possibility of a particular
distinctively future-oriented series of forms of experience and history as temporal form” (2000,
57). By this assertion, things are modern by contrast, thereby creating an old/new distinction.
This sentiment is partially echoed in Karatani Kojin’s Origins of Japanese Literature as he
asserts that “landscape, as I have already suggested, is not simply what is outside. A change in
our way of perceiving things was necessary in order for landscape to emerge and this change
required a kind of reversal” (1993, 24). This change in authors’ ways of perceiving things that
took place in the late 19th and early 20th century, allowed for this contrast of old/new to take
place. The outside had always existed, but it was only through perceiving this outside—an
exteriority not limited to nature, but also to human relationships—that this new era of literature
can be perceived from our modern retrospective. It is this new gaze that typifies much of the
literature in Ch’angjo and its contemporaries and pulls it under the umbrella of modern literature.
Karatani also notes that it is only possible to ponder or imagine the existence or form of
something from within the “epistemological constellations” of our own temporality, situation and
experience. The Ch’angjo writers’ perceptions of the world around them would necessarily have
been informed by these epistemological constellations. Seeing the innovations of the past and
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present making their ways to the Korean peninsula, as well as their hopes and goals for a future
not yet realized, they combine both into their writing as they establish new narrative structures.
In the works published in Ch’angjo we see this idea of modern interwoven throughout the
narratives, the “new” painted in contrast to the backdrop of tradition, which is made “old”
through the juxtaposition. By laying new ideas over various established backdrops, through the
medium of the little magazine, the authors paint scenes that show their changed perceptions of
the world around them and their ideas for a modern Korean literature. By showing this moment
of development, as well as through their attempts at building the foundations of modern Korean
literature, writing for publication in Ch’angjo truly became an act of creation.
Some of the major areas in which these modern developments in both literature and society
can be seen are highlighted in the various works of Ch’angjo. The treatment of medicine and
mental/physical health, education, the rural urban divide, and religion are just some of the
windows through which Ch’angjo paints an image of Korean modernity during the early colonial
period. The translated literature selected for inclusion in the publication also gives insight into
the literary aims of the authors and translators beyond the confines of the Korean peninsula and
at times beyond the borders of Japanese and Western imperialism. Finally, the writing of female
characters, particularly by Kim Tongin, characterizes this moment of development in Korean
literature.
We start by looking at the role of health and medicine. In Kim Tongin’s two major pieces,
“Sorrow of the Weak” and “Oh the Frail Hearted!”, medicine plays a prominent role in portions
of the stories. In both, however, the Western concepts of both physical and psychological
medicine are evoked rather than traditional Korean medicine. This is done to conjure up ideas of
advanced development and sophistication in association with Korean geography and culture. By
marrying the idea of Korea with advances in Western medicine, Korea becomes advanced by
association. This follows the general pattern throughout all the levels of Ch’angjo in which
global concepts, and now technology, are placed in a Korean locale and take on aspects of the
Korean. The doctors themselves are Korean men, the hospitals and places of healing are staffed
by Korean people or tucked away in prominent Korean geographic locations. Therefore,
medicine is a tool used to create modern, cosmopolitan associations with the Korean people.
In “Sorrow of the Weak”, the namjak (baron), the main character Elizabeth’s employer,
arranges for her to visit a physician at a city hospital after she discovers that she is pregnant with
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his child. She catches an electric streetcar that drops her off in front of “S Pyǒngwǒn” (S
Hospital)13. When she first enters the hospital, there’s a waiting room where she has to register
with a receptionist. She waits in a chair with the namjak and is then shown to an examination
room where the doctor examines her using his stethoscope. Descriptions of the hospital evoke
feelings of the modern. Kim Tongin’s descriptions show the broad use of modern methods and
technology in the hospital. Through Elizabeth’s third person viewpoint, Kim notes the smell of
alcohol and phenol and the warm hands of the doctor as he uses his stethoscope, then prescribes
her some kind of medicine, which she thinks is going to cause a miscarriage, but instead turns
out to be some kind of health supplement, forcing her to carry on with her unwanted pregnancy.
While the hospital is modern, it is simultaneously interwoven with elements of the past,
many of which are embodied in the character of the doctor. The doctor practices Western
medicine, yet there are still many elements of the Confucian about his person. This
characterization highlights this particular moment not only in Korean literature, but also in
Korean society, when much of the modern technology and knowledge was present and had
become entrenched in society; however, mindsets entrenched in established customs remained,
particularly in regards to gender. After the male doctor examines Elizabeth, she leaves the room
while the doctor discusses her health and body with the namjak, who consequently makes all the
decisions regarding the child’s continuing existence. Because she wasn’t present during this
discussion, she doesn’t realize that the medicine given to her sans explanation is merely a health
supplement until the longed-for miscarriage doesn’t happen, days into taking the medication.
Kim Tongin doesn’t provide any sort of commentary on this arrangement through Elizabeth,
except to say “The namjak came and gave her some medicine then quickly left the hospital. After
Elizabeth received the medicine, her heart began to race. Although she wanted to take the
medicine her thoughts turning to affection towards the bottle, on the other hand she felt that there
was a curse upon the medicine and she wanted to send it to the bottom of the ocean” (Kim
Tongin 1919). This ambivalence shows that she wasn’t really sure what the purpose of the
medicine was.
13 A reference to Severance Hospital in Seoul, the first Western-style hospital in Korea, founded in the late 19th
century by American doctor/missionary Horace N. Allen.
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Elizabeth’s realization of the loss of her innocence is a key turning point in the story, and it
is as she awaits the doctor’s advice in the waiting room of the modern hospital that she has a
revelation that there is now a past Elizabeth and a present Elizabeth. Her pregnancy becomes the
moment in her life in which everything changes. Her perspective shifts as she realizes that her
expectations for the future and life as she knew it are all in the past. For the remainder of the
story, Elizabeth must then work towards finding herself and overcoming her weakness. It is not
coincidence that Elizabeth’s epiphanies about the great change her life must now undergo,
happen within the walls of a symbol of that same change within Korean society. The modern
Western hospital, reachable via electric streetcar, is a symbol of the changes that are taking place
in Korea, the new technology and knowledge that is being incorporated into Korean society and
becoming a part of it, either alongside or overlaying tradition.
Kim Tongin’s “Oh the frail-hearted” addresses illness and medicine as an even more
integral part of the plot. The male protagonist suffers from depression and has a wise friend in
whom he confides his inner thoughts. This friend acts as a type of doctor/therapist who advises
him on how best to treat his depression. Health and medicine is also called into relief at the end
of the story with the illness and death of his wife and young son. Yang’s (2018) article on this
topic is exhaustive on the significance of medicine in this particular story, but we will focus on
one particular outcome. The main character, referred to only as ‘K’, is ill and consults his friend,
‘C’, who is seemingly well-versed in Western medicine, well-versed enough to diagnose K with
the nervous disease neurasthenia. K’s illness contrasts with that of his wife. While his wife is
able to overcome the flu, she falls back into her “indigenous madness” (Yang 2018, 435) and
then dies. Yang elucidates, “The madness of K’s wife is accessible only to the colonial gaze, not
the medical gaze…K’s illness is treated as a matter of interiority…In contrast, what drives K’s
wife to insanity does not need to be analyzed or verified with the help of medical science
because it is always already externalized and obvious to everyone” (435). The cause of her
madness is that her husband has abandoned her, and in the text, it is portrayed as typical female
madness, a “Korean cultural defect” (436), while K’s depression is worthy of the medical gaze. It
is significant that at the end of the story, the wife, representing the negative sides of established
Korean customs, is dead, while her husband, whose illness is interior lives on under the non-
colonial medical gaze (437). Kim’s use of medicine to show social development and create clear
breaks between the “indigenous” past and the modern, more cosmopolitan, present shows the
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careful crafting necessary to pick out the “undesirable” parts of Korean culture and custom,
while still inserting the new technology and medical knowledge into Korean contexts using
Korean characters—e.g. the doctor and ‘C’—as well as Korean geographic locations—e.g. “S
Hospital” and the Kǔmgang Mountains. The same indigenizing can be seen in education as
depicted throughout these and other pieces in Ch’angjo.
Education features heavily in much of the fiction published in Ch’angjo. This is
understandable as many of the contributors were simultaneously studying in Japan, had recently
finished their studies, and/or had backgrounds as educators on the Korean peninsula. Education
had been an important component of East Asian cultures for centuries due to the strong
Confucian influence, which encouraged scholarly attainment and encouraged all to strive to be
educated. However, within Ch’angjo, the schools being discussed are not the Confucian schools
of the past, designed to train students to take the civil service exam, but rather schools designed
to teach students art, literature, science, mathematics, and other information necessary for
functioning in an increasingly open world. Nor is education limited to male characters; female
characters also pursue their own education and there are references to both a woman becoming
an art student in Tokyo and a female doctor in “Sorrow of the Weak”. While not all the stories,
contain scenes from the classroom, two of Ch’angjo’s most notable works, “Sorrow of the
Weak” and “Idiot? Genius?”, invoke education and educational scenes to develop their plots and
characters. The main character of “Sorrow of the Weak”, Elizabeth Kang, is a student at a girls’
school in Seoul while simultaneously working as a live-in tutor for a young boy, and Chǒn
Yǒng-t’aek’s protagonist in “Idiot? Genius?” is a teacher at a village school.
While the classroom is supposedly the place where people learn and gain deeper
understanding of various topics, it is interesting to note that although these two characters,
Elizabeth and Chǒn’s narrator, are both deeply involved in education, the points in which they
gain a greater understanding of themselves and the world do not take place in the classroom. As
mentioned in the discussion of Romanticism, the deaths of the fetus and Ch’il-sǒng help them
both to come to certain realizations, and neither of these deaths happen in the classroom. It is
only after they have extricated themselves from the classroom that they are able to understand
the world more deeply. This is especially interesting in the case of “Idiot? Genius?” as we
analyze the character of Ch’il-sǒng, who is not a conventionally intelligent person. Almost the
moment the narrator meets Ch’il-sǒng, he marks him as an idiot. Ch’il-sǒng is socially awkward,
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doesn’t speak at appropriate moments, and has never done well in conventional schooling. Yet as
we continue to learn more and more about Ch’il-sǒng, we discover alongside the narrator that he
has an insatiable curiosity. He constantly gets in trouble and gets beaten for taking and breaking
things. However, the narrator notes that he doesn’t do this out of greed or an immoral desire to
steal the property. He just sees something, is curious about how it works, and wants to take it
apart to analyze. In the final meeting in life between the narrator and Ch’il-sǒng, the narrator
both physically and verbally expresses anger at Ch’il-sǒng because another student’s lost watch
has turned up broken in his possession. Ch’il-sǒng learns through experience, and it is clear that
this trait is misunderstood by everyone else in the story until his death teaches the narrator the
value of such informal education.
Elizabeth too is forced to leave her formal schooling and role as tutor to return to the
countryside. It is only there that she learns her own weaknesses and constructs a plan to
overcome them. It is noteworthy too, that as Elizabeth leaves her education in Seoul, she returns
to a remote village, where she goes through a process of self-discovery. The scenes describing
this path of self-discovery are reminiscent of a painting that has captured a moment in time.
There is little action from Elizabeth as she simply sits in one place and observes her
environment. In one of these moments, she describes the room in the typical village house, with
rice paper affixed to the walls and rafters strung with spider webs. As she observes, she sees a fly
caught by the web, struggling to escape, then a spider emerges from an unseen place and grabs
the fly, pulling it away to die as it struggles. Elizabeth sees herself in the fly and sees her own
situation in the natural events happening before her. Ultimately at the end of the story, as she is
recovering from a miscarriage—in which she delivers the dead fetus on her own as her aunt
sleeps beside her—surrounded not by the hustle and bustle of Seoul, or in one of her classrooms,
she comes to realize that “Humans, while in this life, never ceases to fight with their weaknesses,
nor do sin and vice ever truly disappear. In order to be rid of sin and vice, you must first be rid of
weakness. And, in order to build Shangri-La, you must first rid yourself of your weaknesses.” As
she continues this line of thinking, alone, lying on the floor of the dark room under a blanket, she
finds the answers she has been looking for, coming to the romantic realization that happiness
comes from a life of love. Through Ch’il-sǒng’s, his teacher’s, and Elizabeth’s moments of
education and epiphany, we see that experience is the true teacher. Before these moments, they
have all pursued a typical classroom education, highlighting its underlying importance, however,
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the superior truths realized by these characters were discovered through experience, through
struggle, through coming face to face with hardship and overcoming.
From these two examples we can see that death, which symbolizes the end of the past and
tradition, can be a catalyst for progress, just as discussed in Ch’oe Sǔngman’s essay “Pulp’yǒng”
(“Complaints”). The form of death acts as a break from the past, and it is through these
experiences—which take place in the midst of a more rural, traditional environment—rather than
through formal education, that the characters are able to move on. So while education, as
depicted in the fiction of Ch’angjo, shows a modern style of teaching and learning with males
and females both being able to pursue formal education, this depiction of modernity is further
deepened by the author’s indications that true education and progress does not stem from within
the walls of the formal classroom, but rather through experiences that catalyze a break with the
past and a forward gaze. At the very end of “Sorrow of the Weak”, Elizabeth, having realized
that in order to become a truly strong person she must live a life of true love, declares “That’s it!
This love is the foundation of the path before me!” After this declaration, she physically rises
from her prostrate position on the floor, showing another break from her previous self, as well as
a symbolic rise above her current situation, and sees the world open before her. Thus, while
much of the education in Ch’angjo starts out in a group of students learning in a typical modern
Western-style classroom, it ends in personal realizations of the path to enlightenment, that can be
extrapolated onto a social level indicating that the darkness of the Korean experience at this
historical juncture will be but a catalyst to socio-cultural enlightenment and progress, imbuing
the Korean people with a knowledge and understanding that could not be created simply through
the new and modern “Western” experience.
The experiential education that Elizabeth, Ch’il-sǒng, and the narrator teacher received also
occurred outside of the confines of the modernized city. The treatment of this rural/urban divide
in many of the pieces in Ch’angjo enables recognition of the little magazine’s attempts to
establish a modern Korean literature through adapting various romantic and realist tropes.
According to Karatani, “It is clear, then, that realism in modern literature established itself within
the context of landscape. Both the landscapes and the ‘ordinary people’ (what I have called
people-as-landscapes) that realism represents were not ‘out there’ from the start, but had to be
discovered as landscapes from which we had become alienated” (1993:29). The true effect of
landscape is therefore the subjectivity it allows. The treatment of the rural within the pages of
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Ch’angjo demonstrates this discovery of landscapes and the consequent subjectivity of authors
who have been alienated from them during their time living in Tokyo, Pyongyang, and Seoul. In
three of the more notable works, “Sorrow of the Weak”, “Oh, the Frail-Hearted!”, and “Idiot?
Genius?”, the reader is given descriptions of the rural areas to which the main characters are
obligated to go for health or employment reasons. The characters, used to experiencing the busy
life of the city and being constantly immersed in the ‘modern’, provide detailed descriptions of
these more natural environments from which they have been alienated. Initially characters long
to return to the modern, but in the case of “Sorrow of the Weak” and “Idiot? Genius?”,
eventually they have epiphany-like moments while they are in their rural environments that
would have been impossible within the urban bustle.
As mentioned previously, the character of Elizabeth in “Sorrow of the Weak” has her
moment of enlightenment at the end of the story when she realizes that it is only through the
realization of her own weakness that she can now see the path to becoming strong. But this
realization can only be made once she has left the city. The urban environment of Seoul is full of
the modern, hospitals that practice Western medicine, schools that teach both men and women,
streetcars, friends, boys, gossip, a Western-style legal system with attorneys and judges, etc.
Elizabeth has no desire to leave the city, but following her unemployment, the only place to
which she can return is the house of a distant relative in the country village where she was raised.
She struggles both emotionally and physically during the latter part of the short novel as she
wrestles with the separation from Seoul and the future she once saw there, a failed attempt at
legal redress, as well as the health complications of pregnancy and the eventual miscarriage.
Through these struggles, however, she is able to grow. Separated from all the distractions of the
city, she has time for more interiority. Scene after scene features her sitting on the wooden floor
of the room, deep in thought, or in the courtyard, staring at grass, insects, and trees. These
moments emulate an important aspect of Kim Tongin and his fellow author’s philosophy that
while the modern technology and advancements coming in through the colonial influence were
integral in transporting the characters to specific points in these narratives, a return to nature
and/or the interior drive towards self-creation is equally as essential for self-reflection and
discovery. These moments typically occur in a culturally or geographically Korean setting,
which is consistent with their mission of taking the new and indigenizing it, interconnecting the
novel with established customs so that the global cannot operate without elements of the local.
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We see this again in “Idiot? Genius?” where it is ultimately nature that saves Ch’il-sǒng
from the beatings and derision of those around him who want him to adapt completely to the
norms imposed by this Christian-influenced school. The narrator sees the true Ch’il-sǒng when
he is in nature. While Ch’il-sǒng can’t operate normally in a classroom, here alone in the woods,
he is able to sing beautifully and construct boats to send downstream. It is through these
moments that the narrator discovers Ch’il-sǒng’s possible genius. At the end of the short novel,
this same nature takes Ch’il-sǒng from the world as he freezes to death poetically under a
weeping willow. The narrator, through the veil of his own guilt, comments that through death,
Ch’il-sǒng is now free to do as he wishes. Nature has granted him freedom through death, a
freedom that none of the human characters granted him. Nature also took Ch’il-sǒng while he
was on the road to P’yǒngyang, thinking his urban dreams would provide him with his longed
for liberty to do as he pleased free from constraint, but it was not the realization of his urban
dreams that gave him this liberty, but rather the weather’s cold grip, echoing our previous
discussion on the Romantic god-like characteristics attributed to elements of nature within the
writings of Ch’angjo.
To the educating and liberating quality of nature and the rural as displayed in “Sorrow of
the Weak” and “Idiot? Genius?” is added its healing capacities in “Oh the Frail-Hearted!”. In this
Kim Tongin piece, K, plagued by depression, is convinced to go to Mount Kǔmgang to heal.
While here, he is able to overcome his illness. The narrator describes “‘Off the main road
heading towards Changjǒn, he enters a side path toward Sin’gye Temple, and after walking along
for a while, he notices a couple of tile-roofed houses at the foot of the mountain right next to the
path. It is at this moment when he starts sensing sacred energy’”14 (Kim 1920, 42 in Yang 2018,
432). As K returns to nature, he feels the healing energies not only through the trees and the
plants, but through the tiled roofs of a mountain village and a local Buddhist temple. So, while
spending time in nature was a universal prescription for those suffering from neurasthenia (Yang
2018, 431), for K, this nature was characterized by Korean tile roofs and temples which
compounded the “sacred energy” of the mountains and aided in his healing. Through these
depictions of nature, we can see the interplay between the universal oft-depicted power of nature
14 Translation by Yoon Sun Yang (2018, 432)
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inspired by naturalist and Romantic literature and the energy of local custom, culture, and
architecture that are necessary for the continued subjectivity of the Korean protagonists against
these rural landscapes.
The energy that K feels as he passes through the Buddhist temple is indicative of the
underlying religious and spiritual notes throughout Ch’angjo’s fiction, which serve to link the
little magazine both to the newer international network of Christianity and to elements of
Korea’s Buddhist institutions. Though religion doesn’t take center stage in Ch’angjo or its
pieces, there is an underlying religious influence interwoven throughout. This is not surprising as
most of the contributing writers were Christians or had been raised with a Christian background.
Chu Yo-han’s father was a pastor and Chǒn Yǒng-t’aek would later go on to become a pastor
himself. While Kim Tongin was not a religious person himself, he had been raised in a Christian
household and some of that upbringing is apparent in his writing. The underlying influence of
religion interwoven throughout Ch’angjo is another example of the way in which the new and
the old are woven together, with the Western religious influence apparent, but subjugated to the
Korean context. Christianity is not the only religious influence present in Ch’angjo. The
influence of Buddhism, which had been on the peninsula for centuries, since around the 4th
century CE, is also present in the authors’ writings. This subtle inclusion of religious plurality
shows that the modern Korea envisioned by the authors of the Ch’angjo coterie was one in which
both established and new religious elements were present.
Kim Tongin’s works demonstrate the plurality of religious influence. In the second chapter
of Kim Tongin’s “Sorrow of the Weak”, as Elizabeth is fighting to overcome her own emotions
and anger at her friend for betraying her secret, she declares “Satan a mullǒ kagǒra” or “Get thee
behind me, Satan” from the book of Matthew 16:23, banishing her negative thoughts as those
coming from the devil. A biblical verse again emerges as Elizabeth is coming to an
understanding of herself once she has recognized her own weakness. She quotes a verse from the
Bible as she is attempting to elucidate how she can become strong through true love. She quotes
from the book of John 13:34, “A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another”
(“Sorrow of the Weak, 1919, Ch’angjo, issue 2, p. 21). These examples show the Christian
influence driving both Elizabeth’s moral compass, as well as her awakening at the end of the
piece. On the other hand, as mentioned in our discussion of the return to nature and the rural, in
“Oh the frail-hearted!”, K finds a healing sacred energy in the Buddhist mountain temple in the
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Kǔmgang Mountains. Thus, to Kim, Buddhist practice and the modern Christian influence are
both acceptable in a modernized Korea.
It is interesting to note, however, that while the intermingling of Buddhism and Christianity
is shown in a positive light, some Korean superstitions are treated quite negatively. In works by
both Kim Tongin and Chǒn Yǒng-t’aek we see the depictions of the superstitions ascribed to
unenlightened characters. In Kim Tongin, the superstitions are held by K’s wife, who is
representative of indigenous Korean culture, exemplified in her belief that if she was unable to
see her husband again before her death, “she would turn into a wandering spirit [kohon] after
death”15 and according to Yang (2018), this denotes that by Kim Tongin’s account, “the
uncivilized world that she inhabits is still under dominance of folklore and superstition: women
who die as a result of being wronged return as ‘wandering spirit[s] [kohon]’ seeking revenge.
Her illness cannot be scrutinized by scientific inquiry because it is not caused by physical or
mental problems; it is caused by the vicious traditions of Korea” (436). This is also discernable
in “Idiot? Genius?”, where at the very beginning of the story, Chǒn’s narrator exhibits
superstitious beliefs, sensing spirits of the dead who had hanged themselves or frozen to death in
the room where he is to board. At the beginning of the narrator’s journey towards enlightenment
he is superstitious, believing in hauntings and spirits, but at the end, once the death of Ch’il-sǒng
has facilitated his own awakening, his ideas of the frozen dead have changed, with Ch’il-sǒng’s
spirit “having ascended above the clouds, above the stars, believing that he will rest comfortably
in a place where he can do what his heart desires” (Chǒn 1919, 30). While not as strong a
denouncement of superstition as Kim Tongin’s description of K’s wife, Chǒn’s narrator’s
progression, from an unenlightened new teacher with superstitions of haunting spirits to an
enlightened man believing that Ch’il-sǒng’s spirit has ascended to heaven and is consequently
free and at peace, creates a contrast that casts superstition in a negative light as something to be
left in the past and equates belief in a heaven with enlightenment.
While there is no overt mention of a particular religion in Ch’oe Sǔng-man’s essay
“Pulp’yǒng” (“Complaints”), it contains references and word choices that evoke ideology of
specific religious practice while asserting a universally applicable idea. The essay talks of the
15 Translation by Yoon Sun Yang (2018, 435)
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merits of the complaint, stating candidly that complaints are the engines of progress and that if a
person or society is free from complaints it is the equivalence of death (Ch’oe 1919). He talks of
progress as a continuous pursuit made through the observation of a point of complaint and the
pursuant innovation to rectify said complaint. Combined, these innovations have led to a modern
society and will continue to push progress forward. He speaks of this progress on both personal
and social levels, reiterating that complaints are the things that help to change the environment
around us but also the person within. He writes that “complaints are plans for destruction, and
destruction implies reconstruction, thus complaints will soon become reconstruction” (Ch’oe
1919). As part of this literary magazine of Creation, Ch’oe advocates a destruction and
rebuilding instigated through the act of complaining. He advises his readers not to suppress
complaints, but to speak them freely and thereby improve themselves and their environment.
However, while much of Ch’oe’s essay is touting what appears to be a universally
applicable equivalency of complaints with progress, his writing is grounded in a more local
ideology, that of Buddhism. He begins the essay by saying that while others may consider people
with a lot to complain about to be unlucky, he considers them to be rich, because they have so
much room to create a hopeful and bright future path. Then, in his second paragraph, he makes
an internal shift. Rather than talking about a person’s life situation or their environment, he
focuses on the ego. But not the ego of Western philosophy. He writes of the so-a (小我) and the
dae-a (大我), or the relative ego and the absolute ego respectively. In Buddhist practice the
relative ego is the unenlightened ego, while the absolute ego is the enlightened ego. According to
Buddhist scholar Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki, “enlightenment is seeing the absolute ego as reflected
in the relative ego and acting through it” (2002, 41). Ch’oe references this to introduce his
different levels of progress, that of the individual and society. He mentions the progress between
the relative ego and the absolute ego and equates the development from one to the other with the
transition from a sosahoe (小社會) to a daesahoe (大社會), the characters here could be literally
translated as a small society and big society, or more likely they are a societal level parallel to
the relative/absolute egos. Thus, progress from an unenlightened to an enlightened society
requires complaints. This idea of improvement of the self and society is also a Western
enlightenment ideal, but Ch’oe uses terms from the Buddhist lexicon rather than language
brought to Korean through the vocabulary of Western enlightenment. This is particularly
intriguing as Ch’oe was actively involved in Christian groups from a young age—particularly the
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YMCA—continuing into his elderly years. As a practicing Christian, that he would use Buddhist
references in his universalist essay shows the deep cultural influence of Buddhism in Korea that
can be found manifested in his endeavor to create ‘pure’ literature. Thus, Ch’oe’s use of the local
to appeal to the universal in a global medium is an example of the localized globality that can be
found in little magazines around the world, and alongside the works of Kim Tongin and Chǒn,
stands as further evidence of the intermingling of religious practices in the establishment of a
localized idea of modern Korean religion as depicted in literature.
The religious plurality in Ch’angjo’s religious allusions is further evidence of the translated
modernity asserted by Liu (1995) and Yang (2018), on top of the previously discussed levels of
translation in form, language, and materiality. This process of translation as method for creating
a modern Korean literature is even more apparent though the actual translations published in
Ch’angjo which depict the magazine’s universalist aspirations. The nine issues of Ch’angjo
include many translations of foreign literature—predominately poetry—as well as essays in
which the Korean authors comment on foreign literature. Translations include two series of
modern Japanese poetry, featuring works by nine different Japanese poets, including Kitahara
Hakushu and Shimasaki Toson; poems by Arthur Rimbaud, Henri de Regnier, Heinrich Heine,
Goethe, Paul Fort, Rabindranath Tagore, Percy Shelley, W.B. Yeats, and others; prose poems by
Ivan Turgenev and Tagore; and a novella by Turgenev. The translations chosen for publication
give insight into which foreign authors influenced these Korean writers in their early years. The
translated authors represent a variety of styles, the idealistic, universalist humanism of Tagore,
the Romantic lyric poetry of Goethe, the experimental prose poems of Turgenev and Tagore that
must have influenced Chu Yohan’s own “Pulnori”. The Ch’angjo authors encountered all of
these different styles simultaneously during their studies in Japan, thereby acquiring a wide array
of new techniques to work with. Also interesting are the writers themselves. Translated texts
were not chosen to display the whole range of foreign literature, but rather to show what they
hoped Korean literature could become.
With this in mind, it is especially interesting to note the inclusion in issues seven and eight
of translations of selections from Rabindranath Tagore’s Nobel Prize winning “Gitanjali”.
Tagore was a Bengali poet who was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature
for this volume of poetry. Tagore, a citizen of a colonized Bengal, had a complicated relationship
with the nationalist movements there, and became well-known for his anti-imperialist,
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universalist and internationalist ideals. He also had a complicated relationship with East Asia,
often due to his position as an outsider forming judgements on events without full understanding
of the context (Hay 1957, 116). Many Korean students encountered Tagore’s writings in
Japanese translation during their studies in Japan and his ideas appealed to them. In 1916, Tagore
even visited Japan to lecture and met with Korean students, allegedly inspiring him to later write
certain poems including “Lamp of the East” (1929) about Korea and its freedom fighters. In light
of the message of Tagore’s 1916 visit, it is important to examine the sources of the objects of
translation in Ch’angjo. In Tagore’s 1916 speech, aimed at the people of Japan—an empire of
which the Korean peninsula was currently a part—he asserted the following:
“The political civilization which has sprung up from the soil of Europe and is
overrunning the whole world, like some prolific weed, is based on
exclusiveness. It is always watchful to keep the aliens at bay or to exterminate
them. It is carnivorous and cannibalistic in its tendencies, it feeds upon the
resources of other peoples and tries to swallow their whole future…
“Japan has imported her food from the West, but not her vital nature. Japan
cannot altogether lose and merge herself in the scientific paraphernalia she has
acquired from the West and be turned into a mere borrowed machine. She has
her own soul, which must assert itself over all her requirements.”
(Tagore, in Hay 1957, 77)
From Tagore’s “The Message of India to Japan”, we can see that he was opposed to blanket
Westernization and spoke vehemently to Japan against blind adoption of various technologies
and cultural norms from Western imperial nations. This did not go over well with a lot of
Japanese critics, especially as it came from a citizen of a “lost country” (Hay 1957, 116), as India
was at the time a part of the British Empire, but it must have struck a chord with many of the
Korean students who heard his speech in Tokyo. While many of the poetry translations in
Ch’angjo come from Europe, most of them are not from English, but rather French, and German.
The inclusion of translations of modern Japanese poetry, the poems of Tagore and Turgenev, as
well as discussions on Tolstoy and Dostoevsky highlight a deliberate and careful selection of
foreign writers, curated to break from a unified view of the “West” and its literature and culture.
In their attempts to include translations of literature from multiple languages and locations—
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though probably mostly re-translations of Japanese versions—they supported Tagore’s
universalist appeals and attempted to select the literature which would most benefit Ch’angjo’s
message rather than blindly reprinting every popular piece of Western European literature.
These translations from poets across Europe and Asia and critiques and analyses of
literature outside of the canon of Korean literature also showed a desire to elevate Ch’angjo from
being simply a local publication to being part of the global little magazine movement. By
consciously printing their own works alongside those of writers from Tokyo to Paris, they placed
themselves and the blossoming foundations of modern Korean literature on equal footing with
works from around the world. Bulson also points out that for many little magazines, the seeming
cosmopolitanism within the pages functioned “to mask the relative isolation of their own
location” (2017, 43-44). In the same line of thinking, Bulson points out that despite the little
magazine movement being a global movement, with little magazines popping up on all inhabited
continents, the magazines are “always defined within and against national borders of countries
such as France, Poland, and Spain” (46). Therefore, while including both the consistent material
elements linking the little magazine network and the translations of and commentaries on pieces
of literature from countries spanning Western Europe and Asia places Ch’angjo into this
cosmopolitan sphere of the little magazine, it is still a publication inextricably linked to Korean
literature. Furthermore, it was not designed to be for a global audience but rather to translate and
ground global forms within a new conception of modern Korean literature.
4.3. Gender Archetypes
The heightened literary development in this period also stands out starkly in the authors’
treatment of female characters. Ch’angjo was written predominately by men. Only one female
writer, Kim Myǒng-sun, contributed to its pages and even then, only in a limited capacity
through a few pieces of poetry in the seventh and eighth issues (Lee 2015). Despite the heavily
male-weighted gender distribution of the list of contributors, there is wide variation in the
treatment of gender, particularly in the publication’s short stories. Yang (2017, 2018) has already
done extensive work on the topic of gender characterizations in Korean literature in this time
period, so in this section we will look specifically at Kang Elizabeth, the protagonist of Kim
Tongin’s “Sorrow of the Weak” and how her character and its translated form exemplifies this
turning point in modern Korean literature.
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In the modernist Japanese literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries there arose the
character archetype that Indra Levy refers to as the “Westernesque Femme Fatale”. This
archetype was a hybridized character that was “neither ethnically or culturally ‘Western’ per se,
yet distinguished by physical appearances, personal mannerisms, lifestyles, behaviours, and ways
of thinking that were perceived with the Japanese context as particularly evocative of the West”
(Levy 2006, 5). Japanese literature in the Meiji period begins introducing these Westernesque
“Siren” female characters. They are characterized by their appearance, often with emphasis on
their choice of hairstyle and clothing; by their mannerisms, which flout traditional Confucian
conceptions of women; by their lifestyles, often including living separate from their families and
perhaps working or pursuing an education; and by their ways of thinking, which, like their
mannerisms, betray a sense of modernity in contrast to established forms of Japanese femininity;
among other characteristics. Levy asserts that both the vernacularization of literature, as well as
these new character archetypes that included the “Westernesque Femme Fatale” were “the
privileged objects of an exoticism that underwrote the creation of Japanese literary modernity
itself” (2006, 2). In Korean literature, this exoticism was often retranslated translation. Korean
writers, as they emulated the Japanese exoticism of the West, were in a way exoticizing Japan, so
theirs was not a direct Western exoticism, but rather one tempered by Japan’s perceptions and
selections of desirable aspects of the West. In regards to vernacularization, as discussed in
Chapter 3, this exoticism manifested itself in a phonocentrism that led for some to call for
widespread adoption of the Roman alphabet, and ultimately, in Korea, led to the adoption of
han’gǔl in literature, scholarly writing, and eventually every genre. As for the character
archetypes that emulated the West to a culturally swallowable extent, these made their way into
Korean literature as well. It doesn’t seem coincidental that these archetypes of the positive
aspects of cultural desire are most often inscribed on objects of sexual desire, the female
characters.
To varying extents, these Westernesque femme fatales can be seen in Yi Kwang-su’s
Mujǒng (1917) in the characters of Kim Byǒng-uk, the student on vacation from studying abroad
in Japan, Pak Yǒng-ch’ae, a young woman who as a youth was forced to become a kisaeng in an
attempt to save her imprisoned and consequently deceased father who was the male protagonist’s
Confucian school mentor, and Kim Sǒn-hyǒng, the well-educated daughter of a Christian family
who becomes engaged to the male protagonist. All of these characters display various
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characteristics of the Westernesque femme fatale in their discovery of their own subjectivity,
their desire for knowledge, and their awareness of a morality outside of the traditional Confucian
system. Yi even provides the reader with non-Westernesque women, such as Kim Byǒng-uk’s
sister-in-law, with whom these three female characters can be contrasted, throwing their
archetypical Westernesque features into greater relief. Two years later, these same archetypes
also appear in Ch’angjo, most apparently in Kim Tongin’s “Sorrow of the Weak” through the
main character Kang Elizabeth.
Kang Elizabeth is a schoolgirl who comes from the countryside. She is studying in a formal
school and working as a live-in tutor (kajǒng kyosa) in Seoul, away from her family. Her very
name automatically prepares the reader for the archetypical Western traits Elizabeth will
embody. The first sentence alone gives us enough information to set Elizabeth apart from
traditional Confucian archetypes of women. “Elizabeth Kang, a live-in tutor, finished her
teaching and returned to her room.” In this sentence we learn that her name is Elizabeth, a
Western name, she is educated enough to teach, she works, and she has her own room, all things
that speak more to the individualist Romantic archetype than to the typical female characters of
pre-modern Korean literature. Furthering the subjectivity of Elizabeth’s character, throughout the
novella, we are given access to her thoughts as she goes down a path of self-discovery. She, as
an individual subject, rises to the forefront against the landscape of Seoul and its inhabitants, her
thoughts placed on display for all to read. Kim Tongin enables the reader to see into the thought
processes of Elizabeth as the story progresses so that the reader is able to experience the events
‘authentically’ as she does. Because of this thought narration, as readers, we realize that
Elizabeth is pregnant the same time she does. There are various moments in the story where
Elizabeth is faced with a decision, and as Kim Tongin paints her indecision and vacillation, the
reader is also sent on a confusing journey of indecision, being led to conclusions by her thought
processes in the same way the character is. This process of decision making also sets Elizabeth
apart as an individual as it shows that while she is acted upon by events, the decisions on how to
proceed are made by her. She is encouraged not to bring her former employer to court after she is
impregnated by him during a relationship that forms through rape, yet she chooses on her own,
against the advice of relatives to pursue legal recourse. She is the archetypical Western-esque
femme fatale not only through her background and the various traits given to her by the author,
Kim Tongin, but also through her control over her own destiny, though she doesn’t truly realize
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this point herself until the end of the story. After a miscarriage—the narration of which truly
outlines the lack of reliable knowledge on childbirth among the coterie of male authors—
Elizabeth, through contemplations over the body of the lifeless fetus, comes to know her own
weaknesses and declares that it is only though knowing our weaknesses that we can be strong.
Ultimately her moment of enlightenment takes a sentimental, romantic turn as she declares that
she will become strong through true love, for “Love is the womb that gives birth to strength.”
With Elizabeth’s interiority and subjectivity, her character must be looked at through the
lens of translation. At the time of her inception through Kim Tongin’s imagination and pen, she
would not have been considered an archetype of the ideal Korean woman. She is deeply flawed
and makes countless errors as she works on discovering her own subjectivity; she is a sexual
being, choosing to continue the relationship with her employer after the initial forced encounter;
she is well-educated and able to support herself; and she is seemingly unconnected to any
immediate family members, only a distant relative in the countryside who is related by marriage
rather than blood (och’onmo, 五寸母), to whom she returns when she is released from her
employment. She doesn’t display any filial piety of a typical Chosǒn heroine, and she even seeks
out an abortion through the administration of Western medicine—though in the end, the
medicine turns not to be an abortifacient. Yet, Elizabeth is without a doubt the heroine of the
story. The reader is intended to read her struggle and sympathize with her, then be gratified by
the personal growth she has made by the end of the novel—though they are left to imagine any
real-world applications of her epiphany. These characteristics are not native to Korean literature
and can instead be traced to Western Romantic literature through the filter of Japan. In this form
of exoticism, difference is magnified “through the overt attempt to erase it, exoticism often
erases difference in the professed attempt to manifest it, by reducing it to the purely relative
statues of the commensurable” (Levy 2006). These exotic elements of European Romanticism
are emphasized in “Sorrow of the Weak” as they are set as commensurable to the previously
established Korean elements they replace. Thus, the Confucian woman is set as the equivalent of
the Westeresque femme fatale, and in attempting to erase the Confucian woman, Elizabeth’s
Western elements are thrown into stark relief in contrast with the absent Confucian elements.
This again supports Peter Osborne’s “cultural affirmation of a particular temporal logic of
negation” that operates to create the modern by negating the past through the introduction of
something that, in a certain context, is made new through this contrast, despite the fact that many
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of these innovations had been used in the European literary sphere for over a century. All of this
serves to show that Elizabeth is therefore a translated character, but one who is positioned within
a Korean text and imbued with only enough Western elements to negate an “uncivilized”
Confucian past, all while being painted over a heavily Korean landscape in such a way as to
naturalize this Westernesque archetype into the Korean landscape.
Levy echoes Karatani in asserting that this naturalization of external forms is what drives
translation. “Berman’s ‘translating drive’ is not that which motivates a translator to transport the
ostensible content of a foreign text—as an eminently unknowable object—to the familiar terms
of her own language, but the drive to transform her native language by means of what she sees as
ontologically superior linguistic alterity. In fact, as Kojin Karatani has argued, the drive lies at
the very heart of all attempts to vernacularize writing” (Levy 2006). This drive is present in all
the written experimentations of Ch’angjo and is particularly present in its fiction and poetry. The
coterie members, assessing certain elements of the international literature they had encountered
in Japan as superior to Korean literature in its present state, sought to transform their native
literature and language based on what they had seen. They didn’t want to turn Korean literature
into an imitation of international literature, but rather wanted to imbue their national literature
with international qualities to lift it into a superior realm. This tendency can be seen in all the
elements discussed in previous chapters and is apparent in Elizabeth’s character as well. The
characteristics of interiority, subjectivity, and the search for enlightenment are all parts of
Elizabeth. She is a modern, self-aware girl, and a symbol of Kim Tongin’s exoticism and his
transformative hopes for Korean literature.
The character of Elizabeth was formed in a transitional phase between female archetypes in
in early modern Korean literature. Yoon Sun Yang (2017), in her book From Domestic Women
to Sensitive Young Men, describes two female archetypes commonly found in the colonial era:
the femme fatale character of the early period and the “literary figure of the modern girl” in
literature of the 1920s and 1930s. She asserts that while both archetypes are ‘individualist’, and
they are both driven by Romanticist notions of passion, with wide variability in personal natures,
“the unruly modern girls of the fictional narratives of the 1920s and 1930s tend to highlight the
moral superiority of male elite figures”, while the femme fatale characters and their interactions
with yangban elites become symbols of fin de siècle Korea (Yang 2017, 121-122). In “Sorrow of
the Weak”, the namjak does not escape from the narrative with the moral high ground. In the
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internal dialogue of the rape scene he repeatedly misunderstands her rejections and forces
himself upon her. He barely addresses the fact that she is pregnant and makes no attempts to stop
his wife from firing Elizabeth when she is too ill to continue working. When Elizabeth takes him
to court, he uses his money to win the case, citing that Elizabeth has no proof of their affair or
that he is the father of the unborn child, further pushing Elizabeth into despair. It is Elizabeth,
with her inner battle and ultimate survival and triumph that seizes the moral superiority from the
male character who is the embodiment of many of the negative aspects of modernity. Elizabeth is
indeed the Westernesque femme fatale, and at the same time, she is what Yi Hyeryǒng puts
forward as an emblem of fin de siècle Korea (in Yang 2017), that moment in between Chinese
and Japanese cultural oppression, when Korea declared its own sovereignty, and in the midst of
Japanese imperialism, she is a symbol that the Korea of the fin de siècle can overcome the
current moment of cultural rape. Thus, while we can see influences of foreign forms and
exoticism in the character of Elizabeth, at her core, she is a response to a moment in Korean
history, a moment when the current state of subjugation is not an inevitability that must be
endured, but something that is possible to overcome.
With Yang’s analysis in mind, “Sorrow of the Weak” really was a transitional piece for
Kim Tongin, while it is not strictly a “domestic novel” (kajǒng sosǒl), particularly as those were
quite out of vogue by the time the first issue of Ch’angjo was published, the character of
Elizabeth is very similar to the archetype of the domestic woman. Though she has no family or
strict domestic sphere that she needs to stick to, her vocation is to take care of and educate a
child. She is then forced to return to the countryside and her distant relative when she is
weakened by her own pregnancy. Apart from a trips to a hospital and a courtroom, the majority
of the plot takes place within domestic compounds, and as Nancy Armstrong asserts is typical,
her mind is often concerned with “matters of courtship and marriage” (1987, 5) as she vacillates
between her feelings for the namjak and a mysterious Mr. Yi Hwan whom she claims to love, but
never physically encounters during the narrative. The domestic novel’s treatment of new
technology and infrastructure is also echoed in “Sorrow of the Weak”, as is the symbolic
equivalency of home and nation. Yang (2017) asserts that “each domestic novel imaginatively
redraws its own version of the world in which the home displaces the space of the nation, and
where individual character’s destiny foreshadows that of her family as well as that of her nation”
(30). As discussed earlier in this chapter, Elizabeth’s character arc is highly representative of
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Kim Tongin’s view of Korea’s national trajectory. Yet, at the same time as she takes on these
elements of the domestic, Elizabeth also shows the beginnings of characterizations that are
further developed in later works by Kim, whose main characters eventually embody the
archetype of the sensitive young man, as can be seen in ‘K’ from “Oh the frail-hearted!”.
According to Yoon, sensitive young men, “lose their unmediated ties with the world outside by
receding into their inner space” (42). This is what Elizabeth does following her many setbacks,
first the betrayal by her friend, then the rape by her employer, next the pregnancy, followed by
being kicked out of her employer’s home, then losing her court case, the list goes on. In each of
these moments, she retreats into her own mind. In the trial, she is unable to speak up for herself
because she has already retreated into her thoughts and cannot force them into the exterior world.
In this analysis, Elizabeth is simultaneously a domestic woman and the beginnings of a sensitive
young man, yet, as shown earlier, she is also a Westernesque femme fatale character on the cusp
of becoming a “modern girl.” Therefore, Elizabeth’s multifaceted characterization in “Sorrow of
the Weak” is demonstrative of Yang’s claim that the move from domestic woman to sensitive
young man was a transitional one, and it typifies the push towards literary innovation and
progress in particular by Kim Tongin and by extension the whole Ch’angjo coterie.
The ways in which Ch’angjo’s literary works were written, the pieces selected, and the
topics addressed demonstrate the authors’ desire to transform Korean literature from within.
Romantic and Modern themes are always used within Korea-specific language and contexts, in
conjunction with those parts of culture and custom that the authors deem to be symbolic of Korea
as a nation. Having encountered Western forms of Romanticism, modernity, and gender
archetypes during their studies in Japan, they translated what they deemed to be the superior
portions of these newly encountered forms into their indigenous literature. Therefore, even at the
deepest level of analysis, the effect of the writers’ efforts was the same as on the surface of this
little magazine, to take global forms and by writing them into the local, create a new Korean
literature that could stand unashamedly alongside global literature in the little magazine network
while simultaneously being undeniably Korean.
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Conclusion
Ch’angjo offers a view into the material, linguistic, and contextual elements of writing as
the foundations of modern Korean literature were being laid. Published in its pages are examples
of the ideas and stylistic innovations that formed the base of a new national literature that
consciously placed works of Korean authors on the same level as works from global authors
spanning from London to Tokyo. Ch’angjo joined the ranks of little magazines from around the
world in its mission to innovate and experiment with new forms free from the censure of the
larger publishing houses and, in the case of 1920s Korea, somewhat, though not wholly, distant
from the censure of the Japanese colonial government.
Ch’angjo’s form, content, and experimentations with vernacularization and written style
place it firmly in the canon of little magazines and as part of the global movement to create new
art and literature without constraint. As part of the little magazine movement and the move
towards a phonocentric mode of writing, the authors of Ch’angjo displayed their collective goal
to incorporate and indigenize elements of Western norms into modern Korean literature. The
emphasis on nature, death, and the interior self sets many of Ch’angjo’s pieces apart as
Romantic, while the localization and melding of external forms of medicine, education, and
religion into the existent Korean landscape show a shift towards the modern as characters and
objects contrast with a present that is being over-written as past. The shifts in gendered character
archetypes lend to this modernization as well, with female characters acting as conduits for the
introduction of positive exotic characteristics and features, while at the same time the
sensitivities and interiority that eventually become associated with masculine figures highlight
the authors’ perceived role of masculine sensitivity in the creation of art.
The winding paths of history intersected at this moment in the late 1910s and early 1920s,
creating conduits of ideology and creativity which enabled Ch’angjo and publications like it to
appear. Korean authors, harnessing these resources and this temporality, were able to express
themselves in ways that were unique to them. As written language became a reflection of the
spoken word—though never a true equivalent—the mentality of Korean writers changed, as
consequently did their artistic expression. Before, particularly in Korea, writing and speaking
had been almost wholly separate spheres—written language was predominately Classical
Chinese, and spoken was Korean—and as they collided it opened up a world of internal
86
reflection, dialogue, and variation in points of view that the writers of Ch’angjo took advantage
of as they used this experimental period in literary history to set the foundations not only for
modern Korean literature, but for the contemporary written Korean language as well.
87
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