Autonomous aesthetics and autonomous subjectivity: Construction of modern literature as a site of social reforms and modern nation-building in colonial Korea, 1915--1925

This dissertation examines the process of formation of a colonial-modern subjectivity in the context of the Japanese rule and cultural nationalism in colonial Korea from 1915 to 1925. In my reading of major literary texts and influential essays on culture, literature and aesthetics from this period, I discuss the ways in which the traditional ruling structure---a holistic system of family and kinship relations, inherited social status and occupations and the rule of aristocratic clans---was dismantled to be transformed into a modern society primarily defined by its functionally differentiated and autonomous spheres.; In the particular context of simultaneous colonization and modernization, the process of reforms necessary to dismember the holistic structure was displaced onto the cultural sphere and performed in the discursive spaces of culture, literature and aesthetics. The old holistic structure was replaced by colonial-modern notions of the individual, nuclear family, economic functions and nation-state. The traditional subject, externally and socially determined, was supplanted by a colonial-modern subject, "internally" determined, voluntaristic subject. I argue that the aesthetic subject, an author and an artist, epitomizing the notions of voluntarism, interiority and autonomy of the Western-style individual, became the prototype of the colonial-modern subject.; As socialist theories started to gain dominance in the first half of the 1920s, I further argue, the modern category of the political in Korean colonial context derived itself from the conceptions of autonomy and interiority attributed to the aesthetic subject from the preceding era. Defining the colonial-modern political subjectivity as resisting the colonial rule, colonial-capitalist class system and residual traditional social customs and ideology and as seeking autonomy from all of these constraints, I argue that the idea of autonomy of the aesthetic subject served to ground and construct a specifically colonial-modern political subject. This study traces the ways in which modern European notions of culture and aesthetics came to play a uniquely constituent role in reforming and transforming the traditional society into a modern one through the process of displaced and culturalized colonial modernization.