| This dissertation is a study of the literature, people and institutions that helped constitute the Japanese and Korean proletarian cultural movements in the late 1920s and early 1930s. By capturing a series of snapshots of this woefully understudied, but remarkably rich moment in revolutionary history, I suggest the breadth and vitality of East Asian proletarian culture as it waxed and waned within an increasingly fascist Japanese empire. My first chapter on the genre of the wall novel sets proletarian literature within the project of the historical avant-garde. My second chapter explores how proletarian writers and activists followed in the footsteps of liberal educators in Japan, and indeed worldwide, as they addressed children through the proletarian media in an effort to find alternatives to State-centered models of education and to the messages produced by a burgeoning popular culture industry. My third chapter takes up the work of a Korean writer, Chang Hyo˘k-chu, who wrote mainly in Japanese, and whose early work offers me a chance to explore the relations between class and ethnicity as they wrestled with each other discursively in the revolutionary literature of the 1930s. By refraining examples of communist-affiliated proletarian literature within their specific historical situations, I show how the broad counter-hegemonic cultural movement produced through a creativity that was both textual and institutional an extraordinary flourishing of literary production, political activism and philosophical speculation rooted in a set of old truths well worth being cast in a new light today. |
