Colonial interiors: Modernist fiction of Korea

The fiction and criticism discussed in this dissertation were written during the late 1930s-early 1940s, a short period of conjuncture when the industrialisation of Korea accelerated, demanding a violent assimilation policy, and when the possibility of revolution lurked only in its absence alongside a flourishing urban, consumer culture. Against these larger historical narratives appeared small stories of personal life located in the interior---of the home, the garden, a photographer's studio, and the regional interior of Korea. Such interiors may appear as predominantly spatial forms, but this dissertation argues that as temporal forms they attest to the emergence of the everyday as the time within which subjectivity was articulated, in opposition to, but never free from, the larger historical narratives of revolution and war. It is a subjectivity formed at the nexus of conflicts and an interiority which is saturated with the rhythms of the society in which it emerges.; Although in Japan there arose at this time a voluminous discourse upon the everyday, in colonial Korea there was never the infrastructure to facilitate the emergence of such a philosophical arena. It was the work of these short stories to elaborate the present as a distinct and contradictory time, just as other literary forms appeared no longer commensurate to that function. These stories thus suggest some of the problems and paradoxes of a colonial modernism. Foremost among these was the problem that their very form had its own history in the metropolis. The most intimate ways of staging the self had emerged precisely from that imperial history which threatened increasingly the customs and cultural practices that had arisen within the Korean community. The contemporary identification of these stories as shishosetsu ---a narrative form often considered uniquely Japanese---has in retrospect helped deem these stories illegitimate as a form for narrating a Korean experience, yet at the time it also could endow the form with added authenticity in the quest to stage a modern self. More importantly, these stories undoubtedly narrated an experience of time emerging within late colonial Korean society.