South Korean High School Textbook Research Collection Of Modern Chinese Literary Works

South Korea and China have a history of cultural communication as long asthousands of years for they are neighbors, which can be easily found in manyliteratures. China has played an important influence on Korean history, includingModern Chinese Literature. However, since the foundation of People's Republic ofChina, strong ideological differences between South Korea and China turned up,which induced the break off diplomatic relations between these two countries, and theopportunity of literature exchange became less and less. When the two coutries cameto the modern history, they seems to face the same breakthrough point, namely theJapanese Imperialist aggression, which broke the cold iron curtain and broughthistoric turn-around for the two countries' literatary exchange. Japan tried to captureSouth Korea as its foothold to invade China. Although South Korea and China werenot invaded by Japan at the same time, the two countries would generate freemasonryfor they were both wracked by the war. The war brought new opportunities for thetwo countries' literatary exchange, which may turn out to be a blessing in disguise forliteratary exchange between South Korea and China.It has been a history of more than90years of South Korea researching ModernChinese Literature. At first, the South Korean were just interest at Modern ChineseLiterature, so they began to translate and introduce modern Chinese literary works toSouth Korea. With the development of research, a lot of achievements were achieved.Almost every famous university in South Korea has Chinese Department, and alsojunior and senior high school offer Chinese as a second language course, which let thestudents begin to learn Chinese at young age. Recently, because of the requirement ofthe times, the communication between South Korea and China focuses on languageresearch, so many universities changed the name of Chinese Department to theDepartment of Chinese Language. It is similar in the setting of majors in universities,many famous universities in Seoul changed the name of Modern Chinese LiteratureMajor to Modern Chinese Culture Major. Under these circumstances, Modern ChineseLiterature's status and importance become weaker and weaker in South Korea, aboutwhich I felt sorrowful. However, it is gratifying that during the process of gatheringthe information, I was excited to find that there are quite many modern Chinese literary works in South Korean high school textbooks.Textbooks contain a lot of meanings, textbooks can not only witness the historicchanges and social setbacks which a nation has experienced, but also this nation'sfuture might be seen through the searching of textbooks. Meanwhile, South Koreatextbooks reflect the transfer process of governmental policy, so the textbooks have avery important status in South Korea. Literature is a vehicle to understand a nation'slanguage and culture, so a student can improve his ability to use the language andlearn about this nation's lifestyle and customs through reading the literary works. Inorder to better understand foreign literary works and resonate with the authors, oneshould know about this nation's cultural backgrounds besides being good at thisnation's language.This paper involves two kinds of high school textbooks, namely Chinese andLiterature. These two textbooks have different characteristics, but both of themcontain some classic modern Chinese literary works. The works collected in theChinese are the original works, namely wrote in Chinese. As a result, the works werenot quite long, but require the learners being quite good at Chinese to understand them.Some junior middle schools have already set the second language learning as non-required course, but the course schedule are not much and the expectation for thestudents is not high. The modern Chinese literary works collected in the Literaturetextbook have already been translated into Korean, but the students could notthoroughly understand the works without necessary knowledge of Chinese culturewhich is a little bit difficult to the students. It demands much time and energy toconsider and research which literary works should be included in the textbooks, so tosome extent it can be said that it is not an easy work and the result is there are veryfew foreign literary works in the textbooks. Moreover, the foreign literary works werestrictly managed because of the specificity of South Korean textbooks. Therefore, itwas quite hard to collect relative information in the process of writing this paper.However, I worked hard to overcome the difficulties, tried to collect as moreinformation as I could, and also tried to give a clear introduction of this issue aspossible as I can based on the limited information collected.The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section1mainly discusses themeaning of South Korean researching Modern Chinese Literature, the reason andmeaning of this paper choosing South Korean high school textbooks as the researching issue. Meanwhile, this paper gives an introduction of the meaning ofmodern Chinese literary works being collected in South Korean high school textbooks.This section also introduces the relative researching methods such as drawing theboundary of the research. Section2and3represents the history of the South Koreantextbooks in modern and contemporary times. The textbooks of South Korea werestrongly influenced by the history and national policies. The history of South Koreawas full of difficulties and hardships which more or less can be reflected in thetextbooks. So it is not easy to understand thoroughly the development of textbookswithout relative knowledge about the history of South Korea. Section4mainlydiscusses the reason why South Korean textbooks collected some modern Chineseliterary works, and the requirement of the works choosing. There was a very strictstandard for the foreign literary works collected in South Korean textbooks. Thechosen works should both hold historic and times significance. Section5mainlyrepresents the communication between South Korea and some Chinese authors whoseworks were collected in South Korean high school textbooks. We can identify thereason why their works were collected by the South Korean textbooks by sorting outthe communication between them and South Korea. Meanwhile, we can realize theseChinese authors' status and their influence in South Korean literary world. The lastsection introduces Lu Xun's status in South Korean literary world and the meaning ofthe collecting of his works in high school textbooks. Lu Xun was the unique peak inthe history of Modern Chinese Literature, and his influence on South Korea has lastedmore than half a century. Therefore, it is granted that South Korean high schooltextbooks have collected many of his works.In fact, it has been quite a long history since South Korea first began to researchModern Chinese Literatrue, and many achievements have been achieved. However,the research involving the collecting of his works by South Korean high schooltextbooks is still very rare. Therefore to some extent, the researching arrangement ofthis paper may has an explored significance in domestic research of Modern ChineseLiteratrue.