UC San Diego

With the central role of Marxism as my focus, I examine proletarian literary texts of 1920s and 1930s colonial Korea for their bodily representations of the masses. Amidst the emergence and proliferation of mass culture during the 1920s and 1930s, early socialist literary criticism and proletarian literature was the locus for the "importation" and development of indigenous intellectual, theoretical, and literary movements that reflect and engage with issues of nationalism, colonialism, modernity, and mass subjectivity. The first chapter, "Politics of the Body : Realism, Sensationalism and the Abject in 'New Tendency Literature' (1924-1927)" analyzes the intersection of socialism and mass literary culture, and begins with an examination of the hybridization of literary tendency, the effect of print culture, and the colonized Korean subject in works by "New Tendency School" writers: Ch'oe So-hae, Chu Yo-sop, Cho Myong-hui and Kim Ki-jin. Drawing upon the convergence of psychoanalysis and postcolonial theory, I argue that proletarian literary tropes like excess, sensational language, and lurid descriptions of poverty underwrite a criticism of colonialism through the embodied experience of the abject subject. The second chapter of my dissertation, "The Proletarian Body in Visual Culture," examines political cartoons, films, and film-novels, and the circulation of mass representations of the "proletariat" in the figure of the abject colonial body. I argue that the circulation of the symbol of the starving body, the insane intellectual, and the trope of utopic resolution all present nationalism as "in-between," formulated against sanity, order, and imperial subjecthood. In the later context of the 1920s and 1930s, "The Liminal Spaces of Discourse" concentrates on KAPF's increasing focus on agrarian space. Yi Sang's and Kim Yu-chong's travelogues serve as a comparison point to proletarian and "fellow traveler" literature by Paek Sin-ae, Ch'ae Man-sik, and Yi Ik-sang, which provide what I argue to be temporal and spatial "interruptions" to universal narratives mediated by official Marxism, as well as by logics of modernity. My final chapter "From Artist to Soldier of Culture : The Case of Pak Yong-hui" addresses the issue of the "conversion" of leftist intellectuals to Japanese nationalism in the mid-1930s at the dissolution of KAPF