Under consideration in this review are two studies of colonial Korean literature that will help us appreciate why there has been so much excitement about English-language scholarship in the field of modern Korean literature recently, after years of unfavorable comparisons with studies of other East Asian literatures. In very different ways that turn out to be surprisingly complementary, Sunyoung Park and Janet Poole enable a deep, balanced, and meticulously contextualized understanding of the period of Korean history still the most prone to retrospective political passions.

Let me begin with The Proletarian Wave, Sunyoung Park's thorough and thoughtful study of leftist culture in colonial Korea that pays particular attention to the impact and counterhegemonic function of literary production. “Leftist,” declares Park at the outset, is synonymous with “socialism-inspired” in her usage, where socialism refers broadly to “any political theory that joins a critique of modern capitalist society to an egalitarian and communitarian vision” (Park, p. 16). While “inspired” may seem an oddly vague term to employ in the way of definition, it soon becomes clear that this vagueness is both deliberate and strategic, as it allows Park to locate Marxism as only one of the many strands woven into the fabric of leftist culture. Park appropriately draws attention to anarchism and—perhaps more contentiously—nationalism as two other important strands. Indeed, the breadth of the book will surprise a reader expecting to find a standard narrative about the colonial leftist literature. A major achievement of Park's study is how it manages to parse, contextualize, and ultimately pluralize our understanding of socialism within the ideological and cultural terrain of colonial Korea.

Divided into three parts—“Backgrounds,” “Landscapes,” and “Portraits”—The Proletarian Wave moves us by increments from the general to the specific. “Backgrounds” begins with a succinct yet lucid historical overview of the leftist movement in Korea, locating its genesis not only in the widespread embrace of socialism by Korean intellectuals following the Russian Revolution in 1917 and Korea's own March First Movement in 1919, but also in the struggles of peasants at the end of the Chosŏn dynasty and labor activism of dockhands, construction workers, miners, transport laborers, factory workers, and the like in the first decades of colonial rule. Tracing the rise of the Korean Communist Party and its persecution by the Japanese colonial authorities within both domestic and international contexts, Park then paints a sketch of how the weak political organization of the leftist movement, manifested in the lack of a stable party center, had the effect of giving it a forced cultural focus, rendering culture a particularly vital and fertile field for examination.

In the next two chapters that make up “Landscapes,” Park turns precisely to this question of culture, in order to think through the relationships among literature, socialism, colonialism, and modernity. Socialism provided an inspiration for both the anti-traditionalist and the anti-imperialist mission that Korean leftist intellectuals gave themselves as they politicized their art. KAPF was undeniably the organizational linchpin of this leftist culture. Emerging in the mid-1920s as a socially mixed cultural group consisting primarily of young intellectuals, workers, and Korean expatriates in Japan, KAPF enjoyed its heyday in the late 1920s and early 1930s as a dogmatically Marxist organization but was dissolved in 1935 after the arrest and forced ideological conversion of its members by the colonial government. The book reveals both the importance and the limits of KAPF. Especially enlightening is Park's analysis of how KAPF's striving toward ideological purity and normativity contributed to its own demise, both by making it more vulnerable to attack by the colonial government and by closing off possible avenues of collaboration with other groups that were sympathetic to socialism.

A central insight of these chapters is that the leftist culture was “an alternative form of modernity” (Park, p. 121), alternative in the sense that it aligned with neither the imperial nor the bourgeois visions that ultimately won out. In making this argument, Park combats two popular tendencies in the existing discourses of modernity that have had the effect of marginalizing, if not actively excluding, the socialist imagination. The first is the tendency to define modernity primarily in terms of the production of the Western-style individual within capitalist development, and thus to label any communitarian vision as unmodern. The second is the equation of literary modernity with modernist aestheticism, which resulted in an implicit enforcement of the boundary between the aesthetic and the political. Against these tendencies, Park rehabilitates the modernist vision of socialism-inspired alternatives in the third part of the book by offering contextualized close readings of the works of four writers: Yi Kiyŏng, Yŏm Sangsŏp, Kang Kyŏngae, and Kim Namch’ŏn. Each is strategically selected to illuminate a significant aspect of the complexity of the leftist culture, and presented in light of social, political, and cultural pressures of their times, ranging from the international radicalism of the 1920s, to the left-right split within the Korean nationalist movement, to Japan's policy of tenkō in the mid-1930s.

The major work of peasant literature penned by Yi Kiyŏng, the representative KAPF writer, becomes in The Proletarian Wave the occasion for thinking undogmatically about socialist realism. Park reads Yi Kiyŏng's deviations from the criteria of socialist realist novels in the Soviet Union not as signs of the novel's failure but as the meaningful consequences of the writer's sustained attempt to translate socialist universals under the predominantly rural and heavily surveilled contingencies of the proletarian problem in colonial Korea.

The literary practice of Yŏm Sangsŏp, best remembered today as a sharp critic of KAPF and a bourgeois nationalist writer who advocated individual liberty, is reinterpreted as organic critique along the lines of Lukacs's critical realism. By placing greater weight on Yŏm's lesser-known essays when analyzing his major fictional works, Park carefully excavates in them “a national subjectivity tinged with socialism” (Park, p. 171), a distinctively socialist understanding of the reality of colonial Korea and the plight of the peasant masses that reveals the mutual imbrication of socialism and nationalism in the “bourgeois” writer's thought.

The chapter on Kang Kyŏngae, one of the several socialist women writers who began to publish in the 1930s, disrupts another well-accepted view, namely that the Korean feminist movement, once led by the liberal feminists of the early 1920s known loosely as New Women, lost its commitment to women's issues when it became reoriented toward the question of class in the 1930s. Park makes the compelling argument that if the elaboration of classic liberal feminist themes oriented toward the individual woman character are given a short shrift in writings of women like Kang, this has to do less with a retreat from the issue of women's liberation under the pressures of the male-oriented narrative convention of socialist writing than with a desire to articulate a “relational and communitarian morality that makes a woman responsible for fostering the well-being of other women” (Park, p. 208). Park reads Kang's works as examples of palimpsestic writing that allowed socialist women writers to simultaneously observe and subvert the gendered norms of their literary environment.

The last portrait offered is fittingly of Kim Namch’ŏn. A member of KAPF who was forced to recant his ideology in the mid-1930s, Kim Namch’ŏn lived through a phase of Japanese rule that cultivated a deep split in the psyche of colonial intellectuals. Park locates in Kim the “unlikely convergence of a committed socialist and a flaneur” (Park, p. 251). The convergence quotidianized the former and politicized the latter. In other words, Kim gave up the dogmatism of historical determinism and embraced in its place a critique of capitalism as manifested in everyday life of the oppressed colonials, without ever giving up his commitment to the materialist method.

A common thread that runs through these rich analyses is the desire to rescue the leftist culture and socialist legacy in colonial Korea from “the global cultural politics of the Cold War period” (Park, p. 84). That such politics led to the excision from public memory of colonial-era leftist texts for decades in South Korea, which were then rediscovered after the country's democratization, is perhaps not surprising. In the process of both forging a systematic amnesia and recovering once-banned history, ideological orthodoxy became the criterion of identifying leftist texts and writers. This is the reason, Park argues, that “excessive emphasis” came to be placed on KAPF, and “the complex history of world socialism … [was] reduced to a simple story line of Marxism-Leninism” (Park, p. 84). Taken as something more or less synonymous with KAPF literature, leftist cultural practice was broadly panned as “foreign-influenced” and a “mistake for the nation” by anti-communist South Korean critics like Cho Yŏnhyŏn (Park, p. 158).

What is surprising is the completely opposite manner in which the more recent English-language scholarship on the construction of a North Korean literary institution tends to treat Korean leftist literature of the colonial era as “failure.” Represented most notably by Brian Myers's Han Sŏrya and North Korean Literature: The Failure of Socialist Realism in the DPRK (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994) and Tatiana Gabroussenko's Soldiers of the Cultural Front: Developments in the Early History of North Korean Literature and Literary Policy (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2010), such scholarship charges that leftist literature in colonial Korea deviated too much from Marxist ideology to make the term “socialist” meaningful. Or else, they were mere insipid, plagiarized versions of the Soviet originals, as in the case of Yi Kiyŏng's “Papermakers,” which was modeled after Maxim Gorky's Mother. The frequent term that appears in such critique is “ethnocentricism.” Seen as a right-wing ideology fundamentally antithetical to socialism, the so-called ethnocentricism of leftist literature in colonial Korea gives way to the post-liberation consolidation of the literary institution in North Korea that is more nationalist than properly socialist, more right-wing than left, despite its professed communism. As Park astutely notes, adherence to orthodox Marxism-Leninism thus serves as the measure for both strands of scholarship, though to opposite ends.

Park responds to such critique by issuing a balanced warning against “the absurd expectation that, in a perfect world, events, institutions, and ideas in a colonial culture will somehow fall in line with abstract orthodoxies that have their origins in the Soviet Union or the Western world” (Park, p. 87). In documenting, rebalancing, and rehabilitating the diverse and fascinating ways “the socialist question was answered in ways that must appear unsocialist by strict criteria” (Park, p. 85), The Proletarian Wave goes an admirably long way toward giving its readers a lively sense of the “original ecosystem” in which the writers analyzed in the book struggled to express their social commitments, under immense pressures and against great odds. Less interested in classifying intellectual positions and evaluating them according to a preexisting gradient of orthodoxy than in exploring how ideas travel, transform actual lives, and are transformed by these lives in turn, Park's scholarship may be described in the very terms that she used to assess why Kim Namch’ŏn's writing, and indeed the entire leftist culture in Korea, remained so resilient: “abandon schematism and teleology in favor of a more eclectic, less doctrinal approach to literary production” (Park, p. 240). The Proletarian Wave is a dignified book, made so by the very dignity it restores to the lives, works, and visions that became hostage to a vicious rewriting or forced silence by a future much more desperate than any of the writers themselves could have anticipated.

Let me now turn to Janet Poole's long-awaited When the Future Disappears: The Modernist Imagination in Late Colonial Korea, a brilliant study of the works of six Korean writers produced in both Korean and Japanese during the last decade of colonial rule. Like Park, Poole devotes the last chapter of her book to Kim Namch’ŏn. The fact, however, that the entire chapter is organized around a text that appears only in a brief footnote in Park's book—a 1943 short story written in Japanese called “One Morning,” the last piece of fiction that Kim ever wrote—reveals an important difference in style between the two authors. Whereas Park's approach is more expansive and literary historical, Poole explores, in her own words, “aesthetic constellations of the time through relatively few works” (Poole, p. 12). While Park gives us backgrounds before landscapes and landscapes before portraits, Poole invites us into exquisite details of a handful of texts, many of them considered minor in received literary genealogies, and then leads us out of them into ruminations on big questions. The biggest of them all is the nature of time.

In a sense, Poole's book picks up where Park's leaves off. This is not entirely a matter of coverage, since Park's book does also discuss the late colonial period. It is instead a matter of a more intimate sense of time. Poole chooses to begin her examination at the very point when socialism could no longer inspire the imagination of writers as a practicable reality. To the extent that the socialist imagination necessarily posits a future that must be made more just than the present, its literature is, if not of young men, then at least of youth; Poole declares that the literature she analyzes is of “dusky evening” and middle-aged men. Kim Namch’ŏn, for all the self-doubt of his kobal literature and his susceptibility to the pressures of ideological conversion, remains a youthful figure of counterhegemonic resistance in Park's book, and even his choice of solipsism in the last years of the colonial rule when he stopped writing fiction altogether is interpreted as a “social, rather than asocial, consequence” (Park, p. 265). Poole, in contrast, seizes on the moment right before Kim Namch’ŏn fell silent, and analyzes a story in which the writer is the father of four, awaiting the birth of his fifth. The middle-aged writer in this Japanese-language account is a much more ambivalent figure than his youthful counterpart in Park's book. His “everyday,” as Poole sees it, is less politicized than messy, less counterhegemonic than “inexorably persistent” (Poole, p. 191).

An efficient summary in Poole's introduction tells us what happened in the last decade of colonial rule to age writers so: “Fascism in late colonial Korea took the form of the rhetorical disavowal of the colonial relation,” as Poole insightfully observes (Poole, p. 7), and within the brave new East conceptualized as the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere, colonial bodies were reabsorbed as members of the single imperial body politic. Since the vernacular language was one of the carriers of a distinct national identity, it became the locus of intense and violent state control. The vernacular press was shut down in 1940, and the Korean Language Society Incident of 1942 revealed that the attempt to produce a Korean-language dictionary was a crime punishable by imprisonment and torture.

For writers, this meant the calamitous disappearance from the public domain of the very language in which they had practiced their art and maintained their professional identity. And yet, this disappearance could not simply be chalked up to colonial oppression and uniformly engender anticolonial resistance; the possibility of making a living as a professional writer had itself been engendered by the capitalist modernity that accompanied colonial rule, the rapid commoditization of writing and the establishment of a publishing market in the 1930s. The central argument of the book is that under these constraints of the fascist imperial regime, modernity in late colonial Korea was experienced as a form of foreclosure, that is to say, “the paradoxical disappearance of that which was yet to appear” (Poole, p. 1).

In the exquisite six chapters that follow, When the Future Disappears traces the contours and inner workings of this foreclosure in the writings of Ch'oe Myŏngik, Sŏ Insik, Yi T'aejun, Pak T'aewŏn, Ch'oe Chaesŏ, and Kim Namch’ŏn, unpacking the strange senses of time that inhabit their works in relation to broader considerations of genre, literary historical contexts of late colonial Korea and metropolitan Japan, and broader theoretical discussions about the global history of modernity and fascism.

Poole adopts in these chapters the rhetorical strategy of identifying a textual thread and weaving it through layers of increasingly complex material and broader contexts to create a rich tapestry of the writers' dilemmas. In Ch'oe's fiction, the extreme proliferation of descriptive detail impedes both the imperial ideology of modern progress and the reification of the Korean national past glimpsed in colonial photography. Sŏ Insik's agonized intellectual maneuvers on the subject of historical nostalgias, fully contextualized in relation to the philosopher's engagement with the Kyoto School, lead Poole to make the refreshing conclusion that like another colonial intellectual from a very different part of the world (Frantz Fanon), Sŏ sought to create a fissure in the imperial time of development by adopting “a nonrestorationist vision of tradition that was conducive to revolution” (Poole, p. 73). Yi T'aejun and Pak T'aewŏn, the two writers who perhaps best exemplify the category of bourgeois professional writer that came into being in the 1930s, create the “private Orient” and the “peri-urb,” spaces where an attentive reader—and Poole is the most attentive of them all—might catch those moments when the inexorable drumbeat of imperial time or nationalist teleology falls out of sync even for writers who did not or could not mount active resistance. The Japanese-language essays of Ch'oe Chaesŏ, today remembered in Korea as a particularly tragic example of a brilliant modernist literary critic turned fascist collaborator, provide the occasion for Poole's fine elaboration of aesthetic fascism as an imagined way toward a future out of the colonial impasse.

In the final chapter of the book, Poole turns to the earlier-discussed “One Morning” by Kim Namch’ŏn, highlighting the category of the everyday with which she had begun her analysis of Ch'oe Myŏngik in chapter 1. As is the case in Ch'oe's fiction (and as Park argues regarding the “politicization of the everyday” in her reading of Kim Namch’ŏn), the everyday is a messy, dissonant, and heterogeneous space with the potential to interrupt normative visions of imperialization. Unlike Ch'oe Myŏngik's short story, however, Kim Namch’ŏn's “One Morning” is written in Japanese. Such is the elegant forcefulness of Poole's book, by the time readers have made the journey through it, they will be able to feel the acute pathos of the fact that “the most personal and domestic of spaces in the form that had been practiced in Korean was now to be performed in the imperial language” (Poole, p. 199).

The question of language that confronts Kim Namch’ŏn, and indeed all the writers discussed in the book, is further elaborated in a literary historical context created by a very fine juxtaposition of two metropolitan-colonial conversations that took place between Korean writers and Japanese Government General officials (Im Hwa and Yanabe Nagasaburō, and Kim Saryang and Iwata Kunio). These conversations reveal the process and the logic by which Korean became a “dialect,” and whose suppression would be justified in the name of imperial unity. Presenting language as a “dilemma” rather than a “choice,” Poole asks the provocative question, “Was it possible to take possession of the imperial language without being possessed by the spirit of the emperor?” (Poole, p. 188). The question is left answered in the book, perhaps because answering it is less important than bearing witness to how writers struggled with the question itself. Poole's book bears this witness with much love, helping us to appreciate both the agony of those struggles and the complex beauty of the aesthetic constellations that emerged from them.

If there is a single operative word that effectively captures the aesthetic and political import of the late colonial writing Poole analyzes in the book, it would be “unruly”—“unruly detail” (Poole, p. 39), “unruly practice of philosophy” (Poole, p. 81), and “unruly use of the imperial language” (Poole, p. 197). Unruliness, Poole reminds us, is not exactly anticolonial resistance. These were, after all, mostly bourgeois writers, “self-made, in thrall to the market while fantasizing freedom from it, tied through language to the notion of a national culture but betrayed by the imperial state on whose back they had hitherto thrived” (Poole, p. 11). But unruliness can be productively interruptive, creating cracks in what might appear a smooth surface and prizing them open so they become fissures. Inviting us into the fissures that the unruly writing of these late colonial writers created, Poole allows us, through her own beautiful prose, to linger in a “murkier realm” (Poole, p. 148) and emerge from it enlightened. According to a suggestion in the acknowledgments, When the Future Disappears appears to have taken a decade to finish, and the time that went into the writing of the book shows in the control and erudition on display in every page.

Both The Proletarian Wave and When the Future Disappears pulsate with a kind of ethical force, a sense of injustice at both the short shrift these writers have been given and the kind of broad strokes in which their works have been characterized, if at all, in the overdetermined and politicized field of postwar literary criticism. If the ability to combine a sharp eye for detail with a sense of the broad historical sweep, and to trade the temptation to engage in polemics for judiciousness and balance are signs of maturity, then surely these two books, despite each being the author's first monograph, are mature pieces of scholarship indeed. They are welcome heralds of the future of the field to come, one that hopefully will not disappear.