Localized Globality in Colonial Korean Literature: Ch’angjo as

part of the ‘Little Magazine’ Movement

by

Jessica Marie Morgan-Brown

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements

for the degree of Master of Arts

Department of East Asian Studies

University of Toronto

© Copyright by Jessica Marie Morgan-Brown 2020

ii

Localized Globality in Colonial Korean Literature: Ch’angjo as part of

the ‘Little Magazine’ Movement

Jessica Marie Morgan-Brown

Master of Arts

Department of East Asian Studies

University of Toronto

2020

Abstract

This thesis analyzes the Korean literary coterie magazine Ch’angjo (1919-1921) as part of

the global little magazine movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The analysis is

conducted on three different levels of increasing depth: the material, the linguistic, and the

literary semantic. Through these levels of analysis, it becomes clear that while the writers of the

Ch’angjo coterie were aware of and utilizing many Western literary forms and ideologies in their

writing, it was with the overarching aim of elevating their own national literature to be on par

with the global literature they encountered while studying in Japan. These forms and ideas were

translated into the Korean literary context, not with an aim to make Korean literature emulate the

Western, but rather to indigenize these forms within a wholly Korean context. The results of

these experimentations helped form the foundations of modern Korean literature.

iii

Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge the invaluable help of professors, friends, and mentors in

helping me to complete this thesis. Most especially I want to thank Prof. Janet Poole, for

believing that this was a worthwhile project and having the confidence in me that I could

complete it. Thank you for pointing me towards all of the right resources and valuable reading

materials that helped to create the framework of this thesis, as well as giving me countless notes

along the way. My interest in colonial Korean literature was inspired by you and this thesis

would not have been possible without your guidance.

I would also like to acknowledge Prof. Meng Yue, whose course on the cultural and

historic studies of modern China inspired my interest in literary magazines as a site of revolution.

Furthermore, I need to thank all of my classmates from this course for putting up with a non-

China scholar and patiently explaining to me the many things I didn’t know, my understanding is

much deeper thanks to all of you.

A special thanks is due to Hyun Kyung Lee who helped me navigate the complex visitor

system of Seoul National University’s central library. Thanks to your phone calls and

encouragement, along with the begrudging help of a security guard, I was able to gain access to

the SNU’s stacks and consequently copies of each issue of Ch’angjo, without which this thesis

would have been impossible. Also, many thanks to Dr. Ka Yan Danise Mok, who interpreted all

of the half-legible Sino-Korean characters that my untrained eyes couldn’t decipher. You saved

me hours of time and countless headaches.

I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge and thank my idea sounding board, Sophie

Bowman, Aliju Kim, Sungsoo Lee, and Yehji Jeong, for their invaluable advice and for

answering all of my seemingly random, completely out of context questions. Thanks for boosting

my self-confidence and making up for the limitations of my own mind with your knowledge and

experience. I would also like to thank my friend and tutor Hyein. You’re the reason my Korean

skills didn’t completely stagnate when life forced me out of school. You’ve been through so

much, and you’ve helped me through so much. I know I am your 언니 but I feel like in the

school of life, you are my 선배.

Most especially, I would like to thank Garett Brown. You know what you did, and I

couldn’t have done this without you.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments.......................................................................................................................... iii

Table of Contents ........................................................................................................................... iv

List of Figures ..................................................................................................................................v

Ch’angjo as a product of its temporality and locale ........................................................1

1.1. The Little Magazine .............................................................................................................3

1.2. The conditions of Ch’angjo’s inception ..............................................................................6

Ch’angjo and the Materiality of the Global Form.........................................................19

2.1. Visual Forms ......................................................................................................................19

2.2. Poetic Forms ......................................................................................................................31

The Korean language in Ch’angjo ................................................................................35

3.1. Orthographic choice and distribution.................................................................................36

3.2. Korean vernacularization and standardization ...................................................................43

3.3. Ch’angjo as translingual conduit .......................................................................................48

Ch’angjo as Creation .....................................................................................................52

4.1. Romanticism ......................................................................................................................55

4.2. Modernism .........................................................................................................................64

4.3. Gender Archetypes.............................................................................................................78

Conclusion .....................................................................................................................85

Bibliography ..................................................................................................................................87

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List of Figures

Figure 1: Grid from Issue 8, page 117 .......................................................................................... 20

Figure 2: Advertisement for Yǒjagye, in Ch'angjo issue 2 ........................................................... 21

Figure 3: Title of Kaech’ǒk in its advertisement in the third issue. .............................................. 22

Figure 4 Ch’angjo issue 9 cover title ............................................................................................ 22

Figure 5: Cover art from Ch’angjo issue 8 ................................................................................... 24

Figure 6: Cover art from Ch’angjo issue 9 ................................................................................... 24

Figure 7: Cover art from Ch’angjo issue 5 ................................................................................... 25

Figure 8: A hyǒnmu from the inside of Kangsǒ Daemyo, a mural filled Goguryǒ burial mound in

P’yǒngannam-do (“Sasindo (hyǒnmu)” 2020) ............................................................................. 25

Figure 9: The Hexagram Qian from the Book of Changes ........................................................... 26

Figure 10: Symbols found on the back covers of issues 8 (left) and 9 (right). ............................. 26

Figure 11: Photograph of Kim Tongin from Ch’angjo issue 7 ..................................................... 29

Figure 12: Portrait of Chǒn Yǒng-t’aek from Ch’angjo issue 8 ................................................... 29

Figure 13: Photograph of Kim Hwan from Ch'angjo issue 9 ....................................................... 29

Figure 14: Image from Kim Hwan’s “Kohyang ǔi kil”, Ch’angjo issue 2 ................................... 30

Figure 15: picture of a vase printed in Ch’angjo issue 8 .............................................................. 31

Figure 16: First page of part II of Kim Tongin’s novel “Oh the frail-hearted” from Ch’angjo

issue 6. All text in one section per page. ....................................................................................... 37

Figure 17: First page of Kim Tongin's novel "Oh the frail-hearted" from Ch'angjo issue 5, text

divided into two sections per page. ............................................................................................... 37

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Figure 18: Kim Chong-sik's poetry "Nangin ǔi pom" from Ch'angjo issue 5, text divided into

three parts per page. ...................................................................................................................... 37

Figure 19: Seal on the back of Ch’angjo issue 8 .......................................................................... 45

1

Ch’angjo as a product of its temporality and locale

The late nineteenth century saw the global emergence of a new literary endeavor. Authors,

who had theretofore published their works through the medium and filter of various government,

religious, and large private publishing houses, decided to pursue a new avenue of self-

publication. Groups and networks of authors formed and began publishing their own magazines

funded by monetary contributions of the authors themselves and small fees from subscribers.

This began a trend known as the ‘little magazine movement’. These little magazines, which

promised literary experimentation and innovation, can be found in most national literatures in the

late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Korean peninsula is no different. Little

magazines began popping up in Korea during the 1910s, possibly in response to the 6th

Publishing Law enacted by the Japanese in February of 1909, which put limitations on the

publication of political materials in Korea, leading the national publications at the time to

predominately print materials that would easily pass censorship (“Ch’ulp’an” 2020). One such

Korean little magazine was Ch’angjo (創造) The Creation1, a magazine that purported to be the

first magazine of ‘pure’ literature published in Korean, and whose mission can be glimpsed

through its title. Its writers sought to echo the societal developments and new ideologies

surrounding them through literary forms on the pages of their little magazine. Thus, their

endeavor was creation itself. Creation of a new literature fit for a modern Korea. Ch’angjo was

founded by four young Korean writers studying in Japan in the late 1910s: Chu Yo-han, Kim

Tongin, Chǒn Yǒng-t’aek, and Kim Hwan2. Together, they organized a literary coterie of writers

to contribute pieces to the publication and printed the magazine’s first issue in 1919. Ch’angjo

eventually drew in some of the greatest Korean writers of the age as members of its coterie.

This was a time of unrest on the Korean peninsula as independence movements, which had

been taking place for months, culminated in the large March 1st Movements of 1919. Under the

1 The English title “The Creation” first appears on the last page of the first issue alongside their own Romanized

form of the title, “Tsang-zo”.

2 According to Yu Pǒm-mo (2018), “Ch’angjo’s development was possible by means of Chu Yo-han supplying the

idea and Kim Tongin supplying the funds.” However, the actual origin of the idea is contested. Some say the idea

was Kim Hwan’s, who discussed it with Chu months before Chu proposed the idea to Kim Tongin (Yi 2014, 44).

2

thumb of Japanese colonial rule, much of the outward expression of Korean culture had been

repressed in an attempt to suppress political dissent and opposition to Japanese occupation

during the decade leading up to these movements, and it was at this point that Japan strategically

opted to relax its cultural repression policies in order to decrease the amount of political

upheaval the independence movements had been causing, thereby strengthening their political

grip by giving the Korean people a cultural outlet (Robinson 1988, 45). In this environment,

writers of varied backgrounds came together as they studied and lived in Japan. These colonial

citizens in the land of their conqueror chose to create what they asserted to be the first magazine

of ‘pure’ literature (sunmunye)—literature as an intentional form of modern artistic expression

purported to be apolitical and independent from any particular nation-state rhetoric; the term was

also used in opposition to mass literature designed predominately to entertain. It was also written

in the Korean language as opposed to Japanese or Classical Chinese. Ch’angjo’s nine issues

contain some influential works of Korean literature authored by writers who went on to be truly

influential in the Korean literary sphere. In this thesis, we look at Ch’angjo as a building block of

modern Korean literature, a conduit through which Korea’s creative literary drive passed, setting

foundations for future development and innovation. Through looking at the historical juncture

that made its publication possible, its material form, its language, and its literary content, we can

analyze the conditions, goals, and global visions for literature and society that were experienced

and held by this coterie of writers in the midst of colonial Korea.

This first chapter looks at the genre of the little magazine, how Ch’angjo fits into this

global movement, and how Ch’angjo became possible at this point in history. The temporality of

Ch’angjo affected its form and content; thus, Chapter 2 investigates the materiality of Ch’angjo

and how it compares with other examples of this global form, both in Korea and abroad. A large

part of the materiality of Ch’angjo is the language that was used, in terms of orthography, word

choice, and grammatical structure. Taking this into account, Chapter 3 looks closely at Ch’angjo

as part of the Korean vernacularization movement, including its move towards standardization of

the Korean language, the orthographic and dialectal choices of the authors, and how various

speech levels are employed. Finally, diving deeper into the semantics and contents of Ch’angjo,

in Chapter 4, we explore its literary pieces and how they evoke characteristics of both

Romanticism and Modernism. This fourth chapter also looks closely at the treatment of gender in

the almost exclusively male-authored works published in its pages. Through an investigation of

3

Ch’angjo’s temporal, cultural, and historical context, as well as its materiality, language, and

literary content, this thesis aims to place Ch’angjo among other innovative literary endeavors of

the little magazine movement, as well as among the works that created the foundations of

modern Korean literature. On every level from the superficial to the semantic, Ch’angjo’s

innovative endeavor in search of a modern Korean literature demonstrates a desire of the coterie

members to both assert a place for Korea among the world’s literatures and simultaneously

produce a sense of locality within the same literary works.

1.1. The Little Magazine

Little magazines became popular in the late 19th century as a conduit for artistic and literary

innovation unfettered by the capitalist structure of large publishing firms as well as an authorial

response to restrictions by the larger publication industry on their creativity and innovation. A

magazine was generally considered ‘little’ on the basis of their readership and publication

numbers. The magazines that fall under the umbrella of this little magazine movement vary

widely from publication to publication, as each, though following the pattern of innovation and

breaking with previously adhered-to forms, was still dramatically affected by its locale. The little

magazines’ appearance in Korea followed closely on the tails of the establishment of the first

modern publishing houses, firms established by various bodies to publish specific kinds of books

and journals3, which began in 1883 (“Ch’ulp’an” 2020). Thus, the publication industry was

relatively new, and breaking with it was probably more easily imagined in the early 20th century

Korean context than it would have been in locations where publishing houses were more

historically engrained. Bulson (2017), in his study of the little magazine as a world form defines

the little magazine as a “noncommercial, experimental medium produced in limited quantities

(usually under one thousand) for a select group of readers between 1910 and 1940” (2). He

further elaborated that “Every little magazine has been shaped by specific social, political, and

economic realities that determined when it could be printed, where, how and for whom” (2).

Thus, each little magazine, regardless of how it was conceived, constructed, printed, and

3 The first modern publishing house (Pangmun’guk)was established by the Korean government in 1883 to publish

government newspapers and texts. Public publishing houses (min’gan ch’ulp’an) began being established the next

year, each with a (“Ch’ulp’an” 2020).

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distributed, was formed by the conditions in which its writers were writing and the place and

time in which it was printed.

Despite these geographic considerations, there are broad consistencies that can be seen

between these little magazines regardless of language, culture, and historical juncture. In

practical terms, Bulson (2017) claims that little magazines were “decommercialized,

decapitalized, and decentered” (14, italics original). Because these non-commercial magazines

were mostly funded through capital put forward by the founding writers and artists supplemented

with money that came in from subscribers, there were often inadequate funds to cover all of the

costs of printing and postage, leaving the writers with a net loss, highlighting that they were not

being published for profit. Because these little magazines were independently published, they

were not subject to the power structure of any centralized publishing marketplace (Bulson 2017,

48). They therefore didn’t have to endure the demands and critiques from more than the

contributing members of their associated literary coterie. Also, as Bulson notes, these little

magazines were not subjected to any sort of metropolitan capital through which people and

publications had to move. They were not tied to Paris, London, New York, or Tokyo. Though

these metropolitan areas also produced their fair share of little magazines, other equally

successful magazines emerged from less centralized zones.

In terms of content and style, little magazines also displayed some similarities across

borders. While all little magazines cannot be categorized into the same literary period or genre,

and indeed, have no definable static form across the publications that make up the body of little

magazines, Melinda Knight (1996) asserted of the American little magazine, that its essence

could be sensed in “their rejection of mainstream literary culture and its emphasis on the moral

basis of art, their abhorrence of middle-class values and beliefs, and the counter-cultural

personae they adopted” (29). This helped to label many little magazines as anti-capitalist

publications, an assertion aided by the net loss that most of the publications reported. However,

not all little magazines were anti-capitalist, and there are as many examples of conservative

publications as there are of progressive ones. These same American little magazines referred to

by Knight (1996) also “celebrated exoticism and reveled in decadence” as well as “demonstrated

how modernism embodied both progressive and regressive impulses” (29). Some of these same

characteristics can be seen in the literature of Ch’angjo as it welcomes exoticism with middle

class leanings, as well as in the little magazines of Japan, Germany, Russia, Argentina, India,

5

Italy, France, the UK, the United States, Uganda, and across Central and South America (Bulson

2017, 3). Coming from so many political, cultural, and social backgrounds, the form must

inherently differ between magazines, and the form of the little magazine was highly adaptable

“as much for conservative ends as…for countercultural ones” (Bulson 2017, 4). While some

writers were writing only for local audiences and others had subscribers in nations around the

world, they were all working on literary and artistic innovation, expanding and adapting their

writing and the form of the magazine as they encountered new styles and attempted to form new

genres, forms, and foundations of literature. This does not mean to imply that all of these little

magazines were imitating each other, rather they were all innovating their own individual

literatures through a similar periodical form whose goals seem to have been innovation and

celebration of progress—though definitions of progress differed—adaptation of other forms to

local literatures, and the search for an ideal of true art and literature. Bulson (2017), in referring

to the little magazine as a ‘world form’, uses the term to direct attention to its “multiplicity and

in doing so foreground the fact that it never belonged to a single country or continent and was

never contained by geopolitical borders, no matter how they were configured” (13). In the case

of Ch’angjo, its inception came about through the influence of multiple trajectories of literary

flow. These Korean writers encountered literary magazines, known as dōjin zasshi or dōjinshi,

during their studies in Japan. These literary magazines had been around since 1885 with the

publication of Garakuta bunko, which according to some accounts heralded the beginnings of

modernization in Japanese literature (Bulson 2017, 60). Over the next few decades, the existing

form of the dōjinshi was seized by literary coteries, used as a platform for experimentation with

the foreign literary forms that were entering the country as it opened to the world, and ultimately

transformed into little magazines that matched the global form in experimentation, helping to

usher in literary modernism. The freedom of the dōjinshi gave writers the liberty to experiment

with vernacularization—forming an integral part of the genbun itchi movement—and new

literary forms like the I-novel, becoming “part of a more widespread tendency in Japan to treat

literature as ‘linguistic art’” (Bulson 2017, 61).

As in Japan, the little magazine was often the conduit through which new Western-style

structures were introduced and eventually adapted to national literatures. In reference to the little

magazines in India, Bulson (2017) writes “Once the magazine arrived in a country such as India,

it underwent a process of assimilation and adaptation…I have in mind the way that the little

6

magazine is at first a place to absorb Western models before an indigenous literature can

emerge” (69). While this statement problematically implies that indigenous literatures require

Western models to be able to exist, we can accept a softer form of this assertion, that some

modern forms of indigenous literatures that have adapted various Western models, did so by

tempering them through the testing grounds of the little magazine. The little magazine is

therefore a form in which indigenous literatures confront foreign models of literature and

indigenize them to suit local literary forms.

Little magazines created a sort of network of artists and writers who were innovating in

different ways but parallel to one another, and “together [little magazines] generated a national

and international system for communication that had the power to make writers and critics alike

feel as if a network was out there somewhere, even if they were not exactly sure how to map it or

where they fit in” (Bulson 2017, 72). As these authors celebrated the exotic, they also

incorporated influences from each other in their experimentations, in a somewhat cosmopolitan

drive towards a form of world literature in many cases. For example, while Japan was

incorporating Western notions of the ‘self’, Humanism, Realism, Romanticism, Modernism, etc.,

the American little magazine The Chap-Book featured posters from Will H. Bradley, who was

heavily influenced by Japanese wood block prints. Another American little magazine, M’lle New

York, featured a café scene on its cover including a background of Japanese lanterns, showing

aesthetic influence adapted from Japan (Knight 1996, 7). Little magazines are interesting in their

shared mission, but widely diversified execution. They were published by radical aesthetes,

countercultural nationalists, socialists, fascists, misogynists, and revolutionaries, yet they all

formed a network of innovation separate from the commercialised publishing sphere. The

prevalence of the little magazine in literatures around the world was one condition that enabled

Ch’angjo to come into existence. However, other conditions were also necessary for its

realization.

1.2. The conditions of Ch’angjo’s inception

Along with the burgeoning little magazine movement appearing throughout national and

transnational literatures, a number of other preparatory events occurred leading up to Ch’angjo’s

publication that made its existence possible. The historical events surrounding its first issue, the

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contributors involved, as well as the location of its initial publication created the possibility of its

arrival on the Korean literary scene.

Released on the first of February 1919, Ch’angjo’s debut issue was published a month prior

to the famous March 1st Independence Movements of 1919 and in the midst of the smaller

movements leading up to that large event. Many of the magazine’s organizers and contributors

supported these movements and took active roles therein, contributing to policy changes that

affected Koreans’ rights to publish in their own language. The timing of Ch’angjo’s publication

was not coincidental. It was not merely the loosening of Japanese cultural rule that needed to

occur for its publication, for even in the relative independence of the late Chosǒn Dynasty and

the brief period of the Great Han Empire preceding Japanese occupation, the publication of this

little magazine would still have been impossible.

In the latter half of the 19th Century, the Korean peninsula’s close relationship with China,

which had been a conduit through which cultural influence flowed for centuries, further declined.

Chosǒn scholars still utilized Classical Chinese for the majority of their writing, and written

forms and styles emulating those of famous Chinese scholars and poets were still held up as the

ideal. This began to shift, however, as the power structures moved away from tribute to the

Manchu-controlled Qing dynasty towards a more independent view of Korea as a sovereign

nation. This disenfranchisement with the Qing, along with increased influence from other

sources, including new religious and political ideology streaming into East Asia from the West,

resulted in a lot of unrest, including the Tonghak Rebellions of 1894 and eventually the Sino-

Japanese War of the same year, in which the Qing military was defeated by the Japanese

military. This victory gave Japan more of a reputation for being modern, not only in terms of

military power, but also in terms of technology and education. At the end of this war, the Treaty

of Shimonoseki was signed which, among other things, stated Qing China’s official recognition

of the Korean peninsula’s independence and autonomy, effectively ending centuries of tributary

status—this also paved the first steps of Japan’s path towards seizing Korea’s diplomatic

sovereignty in 1905 and their ultimate annexation to Japan in 1910. Following on the Tonghak

Rebellions, the Korean imperial government, under the influence of Japan, began to enact the

Kabo reforms. These reforms were largely an effort to modernize and enlighten Korea as it

headed into the 20th century and included—to name just a small number of the reforms—the

abolishment of the traditional class system and slavery which disrupted the established social

8

order and assertions that obtaining a government post would be based on merit rather than class

and that official documents were to be written in han’gǔl rather than Sino-Korean characters

(Schmid 2002, 29).

During this final decade of the 19th Century, the uprisings that led to the Sino-Japanese

War, the Tonghak Rebellions, the enactment of many sovereignty and equality-based reforms,

were evidence of a rise in feelings of cultural nationalism. This is when, after centuries of scorn,

educated Korean men began embracing King Sejong’s Korean script and the first han’gǔl

newspaper was published, the Tongnip Sinmun. This newspaper was run by the Independence

Club, a nationalist body that helped establish the foundations from which “we can trace the

evolution of Korean nationalist ideology and the crystallization of the national identity formation

process” (Robinson 1986, 38). The Tongnip Sinmun helped to begin the establishment of

publication in han’gǔl as standard practice, paving the way for little magazines like Ch’angjo to

appear on the scene.

Following the signing of the Treaty of Shimonoseki and the Korean peninsula’s consequent

break from Qing China, the Korean relationship with Japan grew increasingly close, culminating

in official annexation in 1910. This relationship contributed to the heightened ability of Koreans

of a certain class to be able to pursue higher education in Japan. In Japanese colleges and

universities, Korean intellectuals, including those who eventually founded Ch’angjo and other

literary magazines throughout the colonial period, encountered new literature from around the

world which inspired some with a desire to create ‘pure’ literature in the Korean language. Back

on the Korean peninsula, for the first decade of Japan’s colonial rule, the government ruled the

peninsula through strict military rule focused on subduing Korean customs and culture and

transitioning the Korean peninsula into a modern state. This regime implemented harsh

restrictions on the social usage of the Korean language and practice of Korean customs. Towards

the end of the 1910s, independence movements on the peninsula reached a height, and Prime

Minister Hara Kei was forced to rethink the Japanese approach to subjugating the Korean people.

He appointed Admiral Saitō Makoto to be the Governor General of Korea. Saitō, with the help of

various colleagues, then introduced a new set of policies on the Korean peninsula beginning

what was known as “Cultural rule” in 1919, after Korean demands for independence culminated

in the March 1st Demonstration, in which an estimated million people took to the streets to

protest the Japanese military regime on March 1st and in the weeks that followed.

9

According to Michael E. Robinson (1988), Saitō and his team designed their reforms to

maintain strong political control over the Korean peninsula, by loosening the policies that tried to

push out Korean language and customs. “Naked coercion was replaced by a softer but even more

effective policy of manipulation and co-optation…In legal matters, Saitō chose to concentrate on

areas where Korean cultural sensibilities could be mollified without diluting colonial authority”

(45). With these new policies in place, a space was opened up for—heavily censored—Korean

activists to write to the masses through use of han’gǔl, leading to a deluge of Korean language

publications: newspapers, magazines, literary journals, etc.. Before Saitō’s relaxation of cultural

restrictions, though some publications written and published in the Korean language existed, they

were limited due to the strict political guidelines they had to adhere to in order to receive

government passes for publication (Cumings 2005, 156). Following the introduction of cultural

rule, these restrictions were loosened, though they did not wholly disappear and newspapers and

magazines still underwent heavy censorship.

While Ch’angjo’s first issue was actually published in February of 1919, the month leading

up to the March 1st movement and prior to the official enactment of Saitō’s reforms, it benefitted

from the environment that led up to the instigation of these new cultural policies. Ch’angjo’s use

of the Korean language as its mode of literary expression was made possible through the

preceding movements and reforms that had changed the social stigma attached to the use of

han’gǔl by scholars and activists. It was then able to continue the publication of its nine issues

unimpeded due to the loosened restrictions that resulted from the 1919 independence

movements. While many of the authors of the era were active participants in these same

movements, they also simultaneously owed much of their ability to write and publish to Korea’s

relationship with Japan, in particular their ability to study in Japan and encounter new literature

and ideology. Following on this, Ch’angjo made itself possible through its subject matter. By

asserting itself as a journal of ‘pure’ literature written as artistic expression, it skirted policies

that required rigorous government vetting for publications that addressed political affairs or

current events (Robinson 1988, 46). Its limited circulation also most likely contributed to its

continued publication.

The publication of Ch’angjo also rode the coattails of various vernacularization movements

in East Asia, chiefly those of China and Japan. This enabled not only the widespread acceptance

of literary publication in han’gǔl or in mixed script (han’gǔl with Sino-Korean characters), but

10

also for innovation with the language and the freer use of authors’ local dialects within their

works, particularly as a standard form of written Korean was still being established at this point.

Many pieces in Ch’angjo utilize vocabulary and idioms from the P’yǒngan dialect as that was

home to many of the contributing authors. Kim Tongin’s fiction in the first few issues also sets a

precedent for the use of the plain-style formal endings in much of the literary pieces in Ch’angjo

itself, as well as in other publications that appeared during this time period and thereafter.

Though the topic of vernacularization will be analyzed in more depth in chapter 3, it is

important to note here that the vernacularization movements which took place across East Asia

in the late 1800s and early 1900s, dramatically affected Korean literature and consequently

Ch’angjo. Prior to this, there wasn’t even a concept of Korean literature as we now conceive it.

The term munhak (文學), which we now translate as ‘literature’, through the process of

translanguaging, with Japan as intermediary, took on new meaning around this time. Many

words were repurposed in this way to embody newly encountered Western-European ideas, and

thus the concept we now almost universally conceive of as literature entered East Asia (Yi 2011).

Ch’angjo served to continue and solidify the importation of this new concept of munhak into

Korea. The vernacularization movements helped create a means for importing Western concepts

into East Asian languages, all while asserting a phonocentric view on written language, with

calls for the adoption of various phonetic orthographies to replace ideographic Chinese

characters. In Korea, han’gǔl became the orthography of choice. This morphophonemic Korean

script had existed since the 1400s; however, it was considered by most of the educated elite to be

the writing system of women and peasants, thus literature written by the learned was carried out

in Classical Chinese. However, as the Chosǒn Dynasty declined and the threat of colonization by

Japan loomed closer and closer, Korean nationalists began to cling to the han’gǔl script as

evidence of a culture that was unique to the Korean peninsula, untainted by influence from its

powerful neighbors. The use of han’gǔl thereby served to create a community and took on

nationalist undertones. These undertones are felt in Ch’angjo which used the Korean language to

further establish the borders of this community as well as to place Korea among a network of

nations. This was accomplished through the imagined community—à la Benedict Anderson

(2006)—of the little magazine world. The act of creation resulting in the publication of little

magazines was the assertion of the creators that they belonged as part of this imagined global

literary community. At the same time, by joining the vernacularization movement and writing

11

many of the pieces in Ch’angjo using either han’gǔl or a mixed script, they attempted to widen

the reach of their magazine, establishing another imagined community for implicit nationalist

purposes, using vernacular Korean in an attempt to establish a Korean nation-state in the midst of

Japanese colonialism.

Taking this historical moment into account, who were these men who founded Ch’angjo?

“The members of Ch’angjo were fairly homogenous in terms of their education, hometown, and

religion”, writes Lee Jaeyon (2015), summing up the list of contributors to Ch’angjo as

predominately Japanese-educated Koreans from P’yǒngan province, with Christian backgrounds.

During the Japanese colonial period, P’yǒngan province, particularly the southern part of

P’yǒngan which contains the city of P’yǒngyang, was known for its educational institutions.

According to Kim Dong Hwan (2016), South P’yǒngan province had a higher rate of elementary

education than any other province, this was related to the higher number of protestants present in

P’yǒngan province, and their associated influence on educating as many people as possible. It

was also associated with the merchant class sending their children to be educated at higher rates,

and due to the prominence of P’yǒngyang and its proximity to China, there were many

merchants in the province (49). Thus, it is unsurprising that many of the scholars who opted to

pursue higher education in Japan were from P’yǒngan.

As mentioned earlier, four main authors were involved in the creation of Ch’angjo: Kim

Tongin (1900-51), Chu Yo-han (1900-79), Kim Hwan (1893-?), and Chǒn Yǒng-t’aek (1894-

1968). The most prolific of these four, Kim Tongin, is often given most of the credit for

Ch’angjo’s inception, however, as remarked in the introduction to this section, Kim Tongin’s

major contribution was capital, while the idea is largely attributed to Chu, and possibly Kim

Hwan, according to some sources (Yi 2014, 44). Of the 101 pieces published in the nine issues of

Ch’angjo, these four main authors contributed 51, or slightly over half, while the remaining 50

pieces were written by 14 different contributors. The contributions of Kim Hwan are often

overlooked, as his name is not as well known. However, recent scholarly work has shown that he

was just as integral in the publication of Ch’angjo as the other founders, if not more so. Kim

Hwan wrote pieces ranging from theoretical essays including “A Theory of art” (misullon), to a

serialized novel Sinbi ǔi mak (Shroud of Mystery). He wrote in various genres including essay,

prose, and travel writing. His picture is one of only three author photographs featured in

Ch’angjo, lending credence to the assertions that Kim Hwan was an influential member of the

12

coterie. According to Yi Sayu (2014), when the three other founding members Kim Tongin, Chu

Yo-han, and Chǒn Yǒng-t’aek, along with other members of the coterie, left Tokyo during the

various independence movements of 1919, it was Kim Hwan who remained in Japan and

protected the history of Ch’angjo by ensuring its publication and distribution (Yi 2014, 47).

While Kim Hwan never rose to the literary fame that the other three main contributors did, there

are records of his fervor for the magazine, and he made severable notable recruitments, including

Kim Yǒp and Ch’oe Sǔng-man.

Though the matter of whose original idea Ch’angjo was is a point of contention, the order

in which the idea began to progress towards actualization is a bit clearer. According to Yi (2014),

recruitment for contributors started in November of 1918, with Chu Yo-han and Kim Tongin

having decided to move forward with publishing a little magazine. They first tracked down Chǒn

Yǒng-t’aek, who agreed to be part of the project. Chǒn Yǒng-t’aek then recommended Kim

Hwan, whom Chu had already met and discussed some sort of project with earlier that year. Kim

Hwan also agreed to be part of it, and through his help, they were also able to recruit well-known

Korean artist Ch’oe Sǔng-man. At the time of the first issue’s publication, Kim Tongin and Chu

Yo-han were both 18 years old, Chǒn Yǒng-t’aek was 25 years old, and Kim Hwan was a few

weeks shy of 26. All were living and studying in Tokyo, all had studied either art or literature at

a college in Tokyo, and all were involved in the independence movements of the time in some

way. This brief intersection of these men’s lives before they all parted ways, due to

independence activities and family obligations, set the stage for Ch’angjo’s launch. Furthermore,

the existing network of connections between these four main contributors and the writers of their

acquaintance, often based on their hometown networks, helped to expand the body of

contributions to the magazine and broaden its scope.

The idea for the magazine was conceived during the authors’ time studying and living in

Tokyo, Japan. Thus, while each issue is written in the Korean language, and the settings of the

various stories are generally on the Korean peninsula, the actual printing of the first seven issues

took place in Tokyo, with only the final two issues being printed in Seoul. The first and foremost

reason that the publication took place in Japan is because it was where the writers were based

when the first issue was published, and they had been able to find a printer who already had

moveable Korean type from having previously printed a Korean translation of the Bible (Lee

2012, 48). It is possible that the authors’ Christian ties may have aided them in finding a

13

publisher as well. The final two issues were printed in Seoul, though specifics are unclear as to

why the publication transferred from Tokyo to Seoul. Kim initially footed the funds to pay for

the publication of the magazine because he came from a wealthy family and had inherited money

from his father, who had passed away a year earlier. However, even his funds ran out and he was

forced to liquidate many of his assets to continue publication (Lee 2012, 49). Based on their

educational backgrounds and their ability to fund higher education in Japan, all of the founding

members of the coterie, as well as many of the contributing members, were at least middle if not

upper-class Koreans. This is important to note as they were attempting to establish a modern

literature for the Korean people. However, their conception of what ‘Korea’ is was necessarily

influenced by their social standing on the peninsula.

This concept of Korea was influenced by their conceptions of existent Korean culture. Jin-

Kyung Lee (2000) wrote of the ambivalent nature of the cultural sphere in general, and of

literature specifically during this particular time period. While Korea was a colony and therefore

subordinate to Japan, the Korean people were still attempting to create the notion of Korea as

nation-state, which required a cultural identity. In some lines of thought, however, culture and

literature were free from the power of the colonial authority, and therefore de-politicized to an

extent; although, “it was precisely this de-politicized aspect of modern culture that allowed it to

be mobilised for the nationalist agenda of reforms and education” (Lee 2000, 4-5). The creators

of Ch’angjo used this cultural sphere for their attempts to establish a modern Korean literature,

an attempt that was also professedly non-political, steering clear of explicitly addressing the

political situation on the peninsula at the time, but with an implicitly political agenda as they

utilised vernacular Korean and addressed and questioned aspects of Korean culture symbolically

through their subject matter. In fact, the act of ignoring the Japanese occupation in many of the

novels of Ch’angjo is a glaring act of omission with political undertones. Thus, not overtly

politicizing Ch’angjo allowed for an implicit pushing forward of a nationalist agenda through

creating a Korean literature devoid of Japan, despite all of the authors’ deep connections with the

imperial country.

It is also notable that the idea of Ch’angjo and its realization as a platform for a

distinctively Korean literature took place through a group of art and literature students in Tokyo

because of what was happening in Japanese literature at the time. In Japan, this was a time of

great literary innovation and discovery, which the Korean students were able to observe and

14

experience. Korean students encountered many new literary ideas that they were able to

synthesize and translate into the Korean context, serving as inspiration as they produced their

own literary works. One of these new ideas was that of landscape, which ultimately led to a

discovery of interiority and subjectivity. Karatani Kojin writes of the importance of the discovery

of landscape in the first chapter of Origins of Modern Japanese Literature (1993). He states that

landscape is not just the outside, it is also interior, that which is usually considered

backgrounded. Landscape involves self-consciousness, the emergence of background and

perspectives which bring into relief the concepts of subject and object. This discovery of

landscape was essential in formulating a new Korean literature.

In Yi Kwang-su’s essay “Munhak-iran hao” (What is Literature?), published in late 1916,

he expounds his theory of new literature, not a theory of what literature has always been, but

rather what he perceived the trajectory of literature should be as Korean society moved forward,

incorporating literature as art, imagination, and creativity within the pre-existing concept of

literature as scholarship. This incorporation was not the invention of Yi, but rather a translingual

adoption of Western European ideology from existing Japanese literary innovations and

adaptations of new ideas, which were entrenched in Japanese literature starting in the late 1880s

(Hwang 1999, 15). These ideas continued to be dispersed to writers, readers, and scholars

through the little magazine movement. “An examination of the numerous gazettes, which

provided a public forum for new knowledge during the patriotic enlightenment period, reveals

them to be a laboratory for the many translations of Western terms created in modern Japan”

(Hwang 1999, 8). Though appearing after this enlightenment period, Ch’angjo continued to use

these previously lab-tested terms as well as translating new terms, styles, and ideas into the

Korean literary canon. The aforementioned discovery of landscape, as elucidated by Karatani,

was one such idea that was translated into Korean literature. This discovery of landscape,

combined with the vernacularization of literature and the use of han’gǔl, allowed Korean writers

to discover and assert their own subjectivity. By analyzing and describing backgrounds, contexts,

their own self-consciousness, and by extension their own subjectivity in contrast to these things,

Korean writers were able to use language and a new concept of literature as unifying

characteristics to create a national community. Yi Kwang-su asserted of the new Korean

literature, “Literature must take all of its material from life. These materials are, namely, the

conditions of daily existence and the thoughts and emotions of life, a piece of writing becomes

15

literature if these elements are embedded in it” (Yi 2011, 296)4. The discovery of the Korean

landscape of life and the subjectivity of the Korean person within it helped to establish the

difference between the writing of the past and the new literature.

As evidenced by the patriotic enlightenment gazettes referred to by Hwang (1999), as well

as the Yi’s attempts to establish theories of a new literature in the time leading up to “What is

Literature?” (1916) among the other literary and technological innovations of the early 20th

century, translated terminology and ideology had been entering Korean literature for some time

prior to Ch’angjo’s inception. What is widely considered to be the first modern Korean novel, Yi

Kwang-su’s Mujǒng, had already been published in serialized form in the national Korean

newspaper Maeil Sinbo. Given these developments and the modernization of society and

technology taking place in East Asia at this time, as well as the education levels and social

connections of the writers involved in Ch’angjo, we have to wonder, why the little magazine?

Why did they opt to self-publish at their own expense rather than publish in one of the many

Korean language publications of the late 1910s? To understand this, we have to look at the

history of the little magazine in East Asia, and more specifically at the types of little magazines

already being published in Korea at this time. At the point in literary history that gave birth to

Ch’angjo, the genre of the little magazine had already been around for decades, and knowledge

of this form had had time to circulate to most corners of the world, helped along by the

developments in global systems of mail delivery. As mentioned earlier, Japan’s dōjinshi had

existed for decades already, and during the early 1900s, culminating in Japan’s modernist high

point in the 1920s, Japanese writers built on this established form and founded various little

magazines such as Kodo, Shirakaba, Waseda Bungaku, Mita bungaku, Teikoku bungaku, Aka to

kuro, MAVO, Damudamu, GE.GJMGJGAM.PRRR.GJMGEM, A, Baichi Shubun, etc.. These

little magazines, heavily influenced by the magazines that Japanese writers had encountered

from central and western European avant-gardists, would not have escaped notice of the Korean

students studying in Japanese universities. The privileged economic situations of most of the

Korean students interested in literature and art, combined with their encounters with the global

form of the little magazine and its adaptation into Japanese literature were the necessary

4 Translation by Jooyeon Rhee

16

conjuncture for the conception of a plan to introduce the form of the little magazine, and

consequently many more exterior forms in the emergent process of birthing a modern Korean

literature.

These little magazines were some of the first platforms on which Korean writers

established foundations of a modern Korean literature imbued with elements of Realism,

Romanticism, Naturalism, Humanism, and various other -isms that the writers encountered as

they studied the literature of the world through the lens of Japanese translations and education.

“Romanticism helped Koreans achieve literary modernity, but it required contradictory

endeavours: that of looking out to the world through Japan and the Japanese language and,

simultaneously, of cultivating new ways to organize their own feelings through their own mother

tongue and the forms appropriate to it” (Shin 2019, 161). Thus, the Western influence, was not

truly a ‘pure’ Western influence at this point as it wasn’t directly encountered by the Korean

authors at the beginning of the twentieth century, rather it was the Japanese translation of the

West that heavily influenced Korean writing and the foundational forms of literature established

in Korea’s little magazines.

The little magazine’s flexibility provided coteries of Korean authors the space to write in

innovative styles that would typically not have been picked up by larger publishing houses.

Many of the forms present in the pages of Ch’angjo had not yet been tried on the Korean

audience and therefore acceptance for publication in more of the mainstream papers would have

been difficult, as Ch’angjo’s readership was generally limited to literary-minded scholars. But

what of the other Korean little magazines? As mentioned earlier, a number of literary magazines

published through existing literary coteries existed. What set Ch’angjo apart from these other

magazines was their goal of writing only ‘pure’ literature in the Korean language. Other

magazines posted in either mixed script or Classical Chinese, some even in Japanese, and their

content was not necessarily aimed at ‘pure’ literature, rather it was often mixed with opinion

articles, editorials on current events, and works of popular fiction designed to entertain readers as

opposed to exposing them to enlightenment ideas and artistic expression. The Ch’angjo coterie

wanted to do something different that could not be done within the pages of the established

major publications or other existing little magazines, so they started their own. The investment

provided by Kim Tongin, while not seeing any monetary returns, was an investment in the future

of modern Korean literature.

17

Self-publication and establishing a little magazine also left writers free to write for other

literary magazines in addition to Ch’angjo. As Shin (2019) observed, “Because the literary

professions in Korea were not fully differentiated, the journals were run by small groups of

people who were committed to more than one journals simultaneously” (156). This enabled

authors whose work was rejected by one little magazine to seek out the literary community of

another magazine for publication of their work. This was the case with Kim Hwan, whose work

in Ch’angjo is mostly essay, literary criticism and translation, as Kim Tongin did not deem his

short story “Chayǒn ǔi chagak” (“Awareness of Nature”) worthy of publication in Ch’angjo.

Kim Hwan, however, was able to find another magazine, Hyǒndae (Modern Times), willing to

publish his works of fiction (Lee 2015). In fact, from 1919 through 1927, Kim Hwan published

16 works of literature, six of which were short stories, yet only one, “Sinbi ǔi mak” (“Shroud of

Mystery”), made it into Ch’angjo. The other five short stories were published in five different

magazines (Yi 2014). Kim Hwan alone was involved in contributing to no less than six different

little magazines in his more prolific years as a writer. Thus, the flexibility of the little magazine

as a form enabled writers to be parts of various groups and form multiple connections to ensure

the publication of their work. Not only was the little magazine network important in creating a

global community of literary innovation, it also helped form local communities of writers, with

authors being able to interact and contribute to various publications with different aims and

goals.

Ch’angjo’s aim of creating ‘pure’ literature and their decision to self publish in the form of

a little magazine, enabled this group of Korean writers to skirt certain restrictions placed on them

by the Japanese government, which could otherwise have further limited what they would have

been able to write. While the magazine was intended for works of ‘pure’ literature and the topics

steer clear of the overtly political, as mentioned previously, literature, as part of culture, can be

ambivalent in nature, and while seemingly apolitical, it can be used in building up a national

culture separate from that of the colonizing power, thus giving it political force, despite its

apolitical intents—though it is difficult to believe assertions that nine issues of a magazine run

by confirmed participants in the various independence movements of 1919 could be without

political intent. We, therefore, must view Ch’angjo, in its mission to expand notions of Korean

individuality, creativity, and nation, as political in effect, even if it was never asserted as an

organ of the independence movements of its time.

18

In the ensuing chapters, we analyze Ch’angjo at various depths. Each level of analysis

allows us to see its aims, the execution thereof, and its role in building the foundations of modern

Korean literature. From its materiality, to its linguistic components, culminating in its content

and various subtexts, Ch’angjo was integral as a platform for the creation of new, ‘pure’

literature, a training ground for writers as they discovered and asserted their own subjectivity,

and a conduit through which global ideologies and forms were translated into the local context of

Korean literature.

19

Ch’angjo and the Materiality of the Global Form

While language, content, and style varied from little magazine to little magazine, in both

the global little magazine community and the local Korean one, there were certain material and

visual elements that helped unite and affiliate magazines of this genre across political and

linguistic boundaries. These elements included covers, page layouts, printing techniques,

typographical style, and publication materials (Bulson, 2017). Of these elements, innovations in

cover pages, page layouts, and typographical style can be seen to develop through the issues of

Ch’angjo thereby linking it to the wider global little magazine movement. In this chapter, we

look at the physical materials, as well as the visuality of the components printed in Ch’angjo.

Bulson writes that “when it comes to the little magazine, form is material, material is form, and

the analysis of one necessarily involves factoring in the other” (2017, 21). Thus, while the

materials themselves contributed to the form of the publication, the material within Ch’angjo

also contributes to its place both as a foundational publication in the history of modern Korean

literature, and as an example of the global form of the little magazine.

2.1. Visual Forms

The physical materials which comprised Ch’angjo are not noteworthy in and of themselves,

but only as a comparison to the materials of other little magazines being published around the

same time. Ch’angjo was published from 1919-1921 on A5 sized paper. As one of the first little

magazines for the Korean peninsula, Ch’angjo didn’t follow the more abstract ventures into

Dadaism like many little magazines that came along later and in other parts of the world.

Ch’angjo’s release coincided with the development of the Japanese little magazine, which

delayed the majority of its material experimentation in the genre until 1924 when Futurism and

Dada had a great hold on some of the literary and artistic splinter groups in Japan (Bulson 2017,

61). The general aesthetic of the magazine, however, is very similar to other magazines of the

time period. The cover design, particularly that of the first four issues, is very similar to that of

Yǒjagye, which was being published at the same time. Though, as the issues progress, the covers

look less like those of other magazines and take on a style of their own. Issue 5 inaugurates the

inclusion of art on the cover, forcing the table of contents to the inner pages, and by issue 9 there

20

is a cover page, a title page, and even more pages have been added before the first works of

literature are found on page eight. As the magazine progressed through its issues, it became

longer and longer, with the first four issues averaging 72.5 pages and the last five issues

averaging 95.6 pages. These material components show that while Ch’angjo was created to be a

work of literary innovation, particularly in the beginning phases, these components followed the

general format of the existing little magazines the authors had already seen and interacted with.

One visual feature common to many little magazines across language and locale was the

inclusion of grids within the pages that through both their appearance and their content

connected little magazines to each other in a loose literary network. Bulson (2017) asserts that

this grid is present in all avant-garde little magazines and only disappears when “the avant-garde

print network breaks down around 1926” (57). Ch’angjo’s publication timeframe places it in the

prime period for using the grid as part of its interior design. Bulson also writes that these grids

were often lists of other magazines with shared readership or suggested magazines in which the

readers might be interested. Ch’angjo is no exception. At the end of each issue is a grid that

looks like Figure 15. In Ch’angjo, this specific grid, repeated with slight variations in each issue,

addresses the amount to be paid for a subscription, a warning against plagiarism for those

members considering submitting their

written work for publication,

advertisements, as well as information

about the publisher, agent, editor, and

other technical aspects of the magazine.

Though the information it contains may

seem mundane, the fact that they placed

the information creatively within a grid

creates a significant connection

between Ch’angjo and other global

little magazines.

5 Images from Ch’angjo are taken from the 1970 reprint (black and white) or the Adanmun’go 2016 scans (color).

Figure 1: Grid from Issue 8, page 117

21

Ch’angjo’s grids are not limited to this single box in each issue. In all of the issues except

issue seven, there are numerous pages divided into grids advertising other little magazines being

published by other Koreans, including Yǒjagye (Women’s

World), Kaech’ǒk (Cultivation), Hakchigwang (Lux Scientiae),

Hyǒndae (the present era), Nonggye (Farmer’s world),

Haewangsǒng (Neptune), Sǒul (The Seoul), and Haksaenggye

(Students’ world). Depending on the issue, these are either located

right after the table of contents or at the end of the magazine. The

text orientation in these grids lends itself to creating further grids

through written content and not only through drawn lines. Vertical

and horizontal text orientations are both used, often in the same

grid, to create organized space. Font size and type faces also vary

to give more structure to each of these grids. Figure 2 shows an

advertisement for the magazine Yǒjagye that appeared in

Ch’angjo’s second issue. Both horizontal and vertical text are used effectively to set apart

different sections of the advertisement. Small diamonds, triangles and vertical wavy lines are

also used to further create separate block spaces on the page. This combined used of text

orientation, lines, and repeated shapes serves to organize the page and create visually interesting

advertisements both for Ch’angjo itself, as well as for the numerous magazines that are

advertised within its pages.

Changing the orientation is not the only way in which the text is used to create visual

interest. Differing font sizes and type faces are also used in Ch’angjo to various effect, within

both the grids and Ch’angjo’s body of text as a whole. Literary reviews and critiques of each

other’s work by the authors of Ch’angjo is not very common. Only four review articles appear in

all nine issues. In terms of type, it is interesting to note that reviews by Kim Tongin were printed

in a smaller typeface than other pieces of literature, including the reviews contributed by other

authors (Lee 2015). There is no explanation for this editorial decision. It could simply be due to

space, or it could be Kim Tongin re-asserting himself as editor, as the font size of his two

reviews is the same size as the other editorial notes in the same issue (Lee 2015, 85). Lee (2015),

writing as a critic himself, also surmises that the font size represents the ethos of Ch’angjo to

front the creative and literary while downplaying critiques and reviews, an ethos that was

Figure 2: Advertisement for

Yǒjagye, in Ch'angjo issue 2

22

possibly symptomatic of a literature that “had not yet developed to the point of being able to

produce critical reviews” (85). Thus, as an author, the font difference could possibly have been

Kim Tongin’s effort to put his strongest foot forward. Knowing that the fiction and poetry of

Ch’angjo was far stronger than its critical reviews, he shrunk his two reviews and made them

more inconspicuous. Changing font size is also utilized in advertisements as well. On the pages

of advertisements and calls for coterie members, changes in font size typically serve to

emphasize certain words and phrases, a standard advertising practice. On some pages, the

characters are written with a heavier hand giving them an almost bold appearance. The text of

these advertisements begins to take on the visual appearance of text in Western print advertising

in its boldness, size variations, and the ways it uses design to draw the readers’ eye to what is

being advertised.

These creative experimentations with text extended to the use of

positive and negative space as well. While in general, the Sino-Korean

characters and han’gǔl appear as black ink creating their shapes as the

positive space. In some instances, particularly in advertisements, the

characters can be created through the use of negative space in a

rectangle of black ink, as in the advertisement seen in Figure 3 for

Kaech’ǒk, the Korean peninsula’s first regional literary magazine.

Finally, one of the most immediately noticeable differences in

type face is the style used on the cover pages. For the first eight issues,

a standard typeface for modern Sino-Korean characters is used, but

with the last issue they decided to experiment with a freer font,

different from they typical printed calligraphic style of the time,

hearkening back to

the much older seal

script style characters, thereby renewing an

old form to create the new. To these seal-

script-esque characters is added a blue

shadow, which makes the title appear to pop

up from the page, almost three-

dimensionally—see figure 4. In this shift in

Figure 3: Title of Kaech’ǒk

in its advertisement in the

third issue.

Figure 4 Ch’angjo issue 9 cover title

23

the last issue, we can see an embrace of tradition, while simultaneously innovating and creating a

new Korean literature.

This mix of custom, creativity, and innovation can be seen through the various images

contained within Ch’angjo as well. While its contents are predominately written poetry and

prose, various images can be found scattered throughout the issues. The images can be divided

into three general categories: cover art, photographic portraits, and illustrations. While the artists

and creators of the various illustrations, drawings, and photographs are not given credit within

these pages, their works serve to add a different character to the magazine as it develops and

changes from issue to issue.

We start by looking at Ch’angjo’s covers. As the magazine was an exercise in creating

literature in the Korean language and was necessarily full of experimentation that met with

varying levels of success, every issue did not follow the same form in terms of content, format,

length, or use of imagery. This is apparent simply from looking at the front covers of each issue.

While the title of the publication remains constant on the covers, almost everything else varies

across the nine issues. The general organization of the page is consistent, with the title in a large

font at the top, with the month of publication and issue number underneath (except for issue nine,

where the issue number is under the picture). Issues one, two, three, four, six, and seven have the

issue’s table of contents underneath the title and issue number, then the place and year of

publication. Issues five, eight, and nine, however, have pictures in place of the table of contents,

forcing the table of contents inside the magazine. The first four issues have borders around the

page, the first three sharing the same design of vines and flowers, with the fourth transitioning

into a set of two simple lines. After the fourth issue, the borders disappear leaving more white

space around the title, contents, and cover art. The transition from the first to the last issue

required the loss of a lot of Korean magazine cover norms of the time, including lots of structure,

lines, borders, and order. By the last issue, the font is freer and less rigid, the constricting borders

are gone, a picture featuring what appears to be a wise man leading followers upwards, being

blown forward by the wind takes up the majority of the page. By this last issue, only the

language of the magazine immediately pinpoints the publication as being from East Asia.

The format of the text is another point of interest. Six out of nine covers feature both

horizontal and vertical writing orientations, all reading from right to left. While the writing is

mixed han’gǔl and Chinese characters, they opt to follow Classical Chinese writing orientation.

24

Thus, the binding of the book

is on the right and the

publication opens from the left

to the right. This seems

particularly important when

you look at the cover art from

issues eight and nine. Both

covers include drawings in

which a person is acting as

leader. In issue eight, a person

with a bird-topped scepter of sorts is

leading animals—a hen, a rooster, a

horse, and either chicks or mice—

towards the left side of the page, into the

text itself (Figure 5). The semi-circle on

the left side could also be the setting sun,

symbolizing the future and a march

towards that future, which lies within the

magazine’s pages. Issue nine, as

mentioned earlier, features an elderly

white-bearded man with a raised right arm grasping something stick-like, possibly a calligraphy

brush representing the man’s status as a scholar, in his left hand (Figure 6). This older man is

followed by an almost identical old man whose arms are not visible. In the background of the

picture are lines symbolizing the wind as it blows towards the left side of the page, again,

pushing these men into the pages of this issue. The terrain is an incline, an upward journey,

Figure 5: Cover art from Ch’angjo issue 8

Figure 6: Cover art from Ch’angjo issue 9

25

which could also be a symbol of advancement and progress. Combined with the works within the

covers of these issues, these two pictures beautifully illustrate a drive towards progress.

The image on the cover of the fifth

issue also makes interesting grounds for

analysis, given Ch’angjo’s mission to

create a modern Korean literature,

combining local custom and culture with

the global form of the little magazine. It

features a creature called a hyǒnmu (玄

武), one of the four mythical gods (sasin

四神) specific to the ancient Korean

tradition. The specific depiction used on

the cover of Ch’angjo issue five (Figure 7) is from a mural painted on the wall of the largest

Koguryǒ burial mound in the Kangsǒ region of P’yǒngannam-do (Figure 8). The hyǒnmu is both

male and female, and a combination of a turtle and a snake. The turtle’s head is female, while the

snake’s head is male. They are intertwined to depict the harmony between male and female. The

hyǒnmu also works with the three other mythical creatures painted in the Kangsǒ Daemyo to

show the harmony of nature. The hyǒnmu specifically is representative of north, winter, water,

blackness, and death (“Sasin (Sinhwa)” 2020). It is also associated with various winter

constellations. While we will go into more

depth on the topic of death in Chapter 4, it

is significant that of the four mythical

gods, they chose the hyǒnmu due to its

relationship with winter and death. It is

symbolic of an end, a break with the past.

Yet it is also significant that the symbol of

this break with the past is a traditional

Korean symbol, highlighting the seizing of

established Korean culture as part of the

platform on which they will build a new

nation. On the cover of a little magazine Figure 7: Cover art from Ch’angjo issue 5

Figure 8: A hyǒnmu from the inside of Kangsǒ Daemyo, a

mural filled Goguryǒ burial mound in P’yǒngannam-do

(“Sasindo (hyǒnmu)” 2020)

26

modeled after global forms and part of a global movement, this traditional symbol prepares the

readers for the mix of the global and local that will be found within the pages of Ch’angjo.

The covers also show development through the amount of colour used. From the first issue,

the title of the magazine, Ch’angjo (創造) is written from right to left in a different colour from

issue to issue, as if each title has been painted on the cover of the magazine, the title switches

between blue, green, black, red, and yellow throughout its run. Through the seventh issue, the

colour of the publication date is the same as that of the title. However, as with the inclusion of

cover art, as discussed above, the colour scheme of issues eight and nine changes as well. With

issues eight and nine, the title is printed in black, with the subtext that includes the publication

date and issue number is printed in red. On these final two issues, the cover art is also printed in

striking colour, particularly the bright red robes of the old men marching up hill. The constantly

changing colours, alongside the shifts in cover design from issue to issue demonstrate that the

members of the Ch’angjo literary coterie were dedicated to continual experimentation with the

forms they were working with. Even limited inclusions on the back covers were not consistent

throughout the nine-issue run.

The first four issues contain pretty standard advertisements for future issues of Ch’angjo on

their back covers. The back covers of issues

five and seven are mostly blank with only a

very narrow column of publication information

on issue seven. The sixth issue’s back cover

contains an advertisement for a publisher.

However, on the back cover of the final two

issues is an interesting mark—Figure 9. The

text inside of the two rings, starting at the top

and working clockwise, reads ㅊ ㅏ ㅇ ㅈ ㅗ ㄷ ㅗ ㅇ ㅣ ㄴ, which if put together into standard

Korean syllabic blocks would read 창조동인 or Ch’angjo Tongin (Ch’angjo

coterie) with the final silent ㅇ omitted. This is particularly interesting in

light of the various vernacularization movements and phonocentrism that

were de rigeur in East Asia at the time, which will be discusssed further in

Chapter 3. Writing the title out this way in Western form, from left to right,

grapheme by grapheme, removed from syllabic blocks, also appeared on the

Figure 10: Symbols found on the back covers of

issues 8 (left) and 9 (right).

Figure 9: The

Hexagram Qian

from the Book of

Changes

27

covers of many other little magazines, such as Kaebyǒk (開闢:1920-1926) and Tonggwang

(東光: 1926-1933) and was a common way that artists of the time signed their paintings.

Visually, even aside from the deconstructed han’gǔl, the symbol of a six-pointed star stands out

as intriguing. The hexagram can symbolize many things in many different cultures and religions.

In the form of a star, it is generally associated with Judaism and other Abrahamic religions, yet it

is also used in Dharmic religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. It usually represents

unity and balance as it shows the overlay of two triangles, one pointed up and one pointed down.

Some cultures and religions say it symbolizes the unity of man and woman, others say humanity

and God. However, if we look at its Confucian meaning, it can be another way to symbolize the

concept of dualism (yīnyáng) in all things. While not typically in the shape of a star, in the

Confucian philosophy of the Book of Changes (I Ching), the hexagram of 6 stacked horizontal

lines has the meaning of “Qian 乾 (The Creative)” (Figure 9). These six lines representing

creativity, rearranged can form the star-shaped hexagram, though it would be interesting if the

authors of Ch’angjo had chosen to both creatively deconstruct the han’gǔl and simultaneously

reconstruct the lines of qian into the six-pointed star. Either way, it seems more than coincidental

that Ch’angjo, meaning creation, would be accompanied by a symbol whose meaning can also be

construed as “the creative” within Confucian tradition, merely reconstructed in a common global

religious pattern showing again the interweaving of the local and global throughout the

construction of Ch’angjo.

By simply analyzing the covers of the nine issues of Ch’angjo the reader can observe the

changes that happened to the publication throughout its short lifespan. The uniformity of the first

three issues, all published in 1919, and their similarity to stylistic modes established by

preceding periodicals shows little experimentation with the visual form. Issues four through

seven, published in 1920, show more willingness to experiment, the floral-style borders

disappear and are replaced by a minimalist two-line border for issue four, and then are just done

away with altogether by issue five. In the fifth issue we also get our first cover art, and the table

of contents has been moved inside the magazine. On the covers of issues six and seven, the

creators opt for the same cover style, with the table of contents back on the cover, but the border

remaining absent. Between the publications of issues seven and eight, six months pass. While

there is a longer break between issues two and three, it is this six-month gap in which the visual

nature of Ch’angjo changes most noticeably. The table of contents is moved inside, the main

28

publication title is printed in black with subtitles in red and the striking colored pictures are

included with figures seemingly ushering the reader into the pages of the text and into the future.

The visual experimentation visible on the covers of each magazine, while not commensurate to

the literary innovation that was going on throughout all of the issues, shows an increased

willingness to try new things as each issue was published. If we compare Ch’angjo issue covers

to the covers of other magazines, we can see that it mirrors the development of other

publications. Hyun Shin Jo (2014), through an analysis of Korean magazine covers in the early

modern era, noted that during the enlightenment period designs started to emerge which have

affected even graphic design today. Some of the developments noted by Jo can also be seen in

Ch’angjo’s covers, notably the use of diverse Chinese typographies, the incorporated usage of

illustrations and other visual elements, and the use of red and green (159)—though Ch’angjo

also uses yellow and blue type on a couple of its covers. Comparing the covers of Ch’angjo with

the results of Jo’s analysis, we see that the development of Ch’angjo’s covers is a continuation of

the developmental path forged by other magazines during Korea’s enlightenment period. The

conservative nature of the first three issues contrasted with the striking covers from the final two

issues shows that the authors of Ch’angjo had first developed their craft along established

enlightenment lines and they then took more visual and stylistic liberties as the issues

progressed, participating in a design movement, the effects of which are still visible in modern

Korean cover designs.

29

Moving from the covers to the imagery of Ch’angjo’s internal pages, there are three

instances in which photographs of writers from the Ch’angjo coterie appear in the magazine.

These are included at the beginning of the final three issues. Issue seven includes a portrait of

Kim Tongin (Figure 11), issue eight contains a portrait of Chǒn Yǒng-t’aek (Figure 12), and

issue nine printed a portrait of Kim Hwan (Figure 13). These three authors represent three of the

four most prolific literary contributors to Ch’angjo’s issues. Only a portrait of Chu Yo-han is

missing. While the photo quality is not ideal, it is still immediately apparent that both Chǒn and

Kim Hwan are wearing Western-style suits for their portraits. All three men have short, modern

haircuts. Kim Tongin and Chǒn are staring piercingly into the camera, while Kim Hwan stares

just to the side of the camera’s lens. Chǒn and Kim Hwan sport subtle smiles, while Kim Tongin

opts for a straight-faced stare. Two of the three are also wearing glasses, a stylish accessory for

the modern man. Kim Tongin’s

portrait provides further matter for speculation. While it is a blurry image, it appears that instead

of the Western-style suit of his co-contributors, he is wearing white hanbok-style clothing. The

other two portraits are dark, with their collars, faces, and hands creating a picture out of the

negative space, yet Kim Tongin’s portrait is almost blindingly white, with the black ink of the

portrait working to let his likeness emerge from the page. In the bottom left corner of the photo

we also see what appears to be Kim Tongin’s signature. The signature is not in Chinese

characters, or the form of a seal as might have happened in earlier times, and it is also not in

han’gǔl as one might expect from one of the main contributors to a magazine of ‘pure’ literature

Figure 11: Photograph of Kim

Tongin from Ch’angjo issue 7 Figure 12: Portrait of Chǒn Yǒng-

t’aek from Ch’angjo issue 8

Figure 13: Photograph of Kim

Hwan from Ch'angjo issue 9

30

written predominately in han’gǔl. Rather, the signature is in the Roman alphabet and ordered in

the Western manner of writing names, with the surname last, “Tong In Kim”. This demonstrates

not only Kim’s knowledge of the Roman alphabet, but also familiarity with Western name order.

He is even able to sign his name in cursive rather than print. Yet, at the same time, his style of

dress and the whiteness of the photo6 asserts a continuous adherence to the Korean custom, even

as he adopts various modern styles in his name, writing, and modes of thought. In Kim Tongin’s

photo alone, the mission of Ch’angjo is represented, a melding together of Western forms and

Korean customs. His image emerges from the white background, clad in customary white,

staring directly into the camera as it captures his likeness. As with all the previously discussed

imagery, these photos show the authors’ comfort operating within Western-style modernity, but,

particularly in the case of Kim Tongin, incorporated into the

context of Korea.

Korean culture is further emphasized in the few illustrations

scattered throughout the issues of Ch’angjo. One of the first

images to appear within its pages is an illustration of a decorated

folding fan with a flowered vine winding up the page (Figure 14).

It appears in the second issue of the magazine at the end of a piece

of prose by Kim Hwan—under his nom de plume Baek Ak—

titled “Kohyang ǔi kil” (“The Road Home”), which is an

autobiographical piece describing Kim’s feelings of returning to

his hometown after having been absent at school in Japan for a

long time. At first glance, the illustration may seem like just a

pretty drawing of flowers with a typical East Asian fan, but on

closer inspection, the flowers appear to be mugunghwa, or rose of

Sharon—the national flower of the modern-day Republic of

Korea—with links to the Korean cultural tradition as far back as

Silla during the three kingdoms period (57 BCE-935 CE). Thus,

6 Another name for the Korean people is baek ǔi minjok, or “the white-clad people”, thus the choice of white as the

predominate colour in the photo is culturally significant as well.

Figure 14: Image from Kim

Hwan’s “Kohyang ǔi kil”,

Ch’angjo issue 2

31

even a simple sketch of flowers and a fan work alongside Kim Hwan’s invocations of hometown

nostalgia to create links between the modern and innovative written forms and Korean culture.

These culturally-specific elements alongside newly introduced modern styles and vernacular

writing can also be seen in other images present in proceeding issues, including a sketch of a

woman in hanbok in issue nine on the inner title page. In the same position in issue eight, is

printed a ceramic vase (Figure 15), which strikes the reader as a piece of traditional pottery.

However, on closer inspection, the style of the vase is not wholly Korean, or even completely

East Asian. Its shape looks similar to either a hydria style vase from the Greek ceramics tradition

or a ceramic imitation of a Chinese hu ritual drinking vessel, as the hanging rings on the sides are

more common in East Asian vessels. The engravings on the vase, however, are somewhat

reminiscent of Greek and Roman traditions, with frolicking donkeys reminiscent of a

bacchanalian scene, and the overall symmetry of the surface. Thus, the

vase itself seems to be a melding together of global and local forms,

and just to truly ground it as local, unlike the cover art, the

photographs of the authors, or the sketches of the mugunghwa and

woman in hanbok, this vase appears to be printed using woodblock

printing, or at least emulating that traditional style. This is another

instance of the visual forms of Ch’angjo intentionally localizing the

global, bringing in the global form of a Greek-esque vase, and printing

it using local styles and methods.

The visual forms contained in Ch’angjo, including page layouts, type faces, and images,

show the coterie’s willingness to experiment with forms and try new things as they worked to

reinvent Korean literature. They also show the interplay between global and local forms. By

using photographs and illustrations each with Korean cultural components, by innovating with

cover ideas while including contextually Korean elements depicting movement forward towards

progress, its visual components exemplify the assertion that Ch’angjo’s mission was to localize

the global form and incorporate new methods and modes all the while asserting the concept of

the modern Korean. This is present not only in the visual material forms, but also in the written

material forms, specifically in poetry.

2.2. Poetic Forms

Figure 15: picture of a vase

printed in Ch’angjo issue 8

32

The poetic form was another place of material innovation embraced by the authors of

Ch’angjo and by Chu Yo-han in particular. Chu Yo-han is recognized by some as a founder of

modern Korean poetry yet criticized by others for also adhering to established forms in some of

his poems. Kim Ji-sun (2011) asserted that Chu was attempting to bring the level of Korean

poetry up to the standard of the global poetic form while still maintaining the essence of Korea

through the use of Sijo and folk poetry style (323). Because of his mixing of new and established

styles, he is sometimes seen as both an innovator and a revivalist, simultaneously. This duality of

Chu’s poetic style is apparent from looking at Chu’s contributions to Ch’angjo, in particular,

Chu’s Ch’angjo poems: “Pulnori” (Fireworks) and “Pyǒl mit e honja sǒ” (Alone Under the

Stars).

Chu Yo-han’s first poem, and the very first piece in the first issue of Ch’angjo, is a prose

poem entitled “Pulnori” (Fireworks). Chu, well known for being part of the movement in Korean

poetry to break free from long-established poetic tropes and try more experimental poetry,

attempts such a thing through “Pulnori”, easily his most stylistically innovative poem in

Ch’angjo. In breaking with established Korean poetic style, Chu also opted not to turn to

standard European poetic form as an alternative, preferring to experiment with the lesser known

prose poem, a style that had been popularized in the 19th Century by various French and German

poets, most notably Baudelaire. According to Edward Hirsch, “the prose poem takes advantage

of its hybrid nature — it avails itself of the elements of prose (what Dryden called ‘the other

harmony of prose’) while foregrounding the devices of poetry” (2014, 489). This style of poem,

therefore, acts as a sort of hybrid between poetry and prose, abandoning the stereotypical verse

structure of poetry and opting for a freer, more prose-like, paragraph structure, while still

eschewing standardized sentence structure and punctuation. The content is also more of a hybrid

than purely poetry or prose. Prose poetry incorporates the images and descriptiveness of poetry,

yet the flow of the subject seems more strictly connected and often somewhat conversational in

tone as you would find in a work of prose.

Chu Yo-han’s “Pulnori” fits this description of a prose poem quite well. To an extent, it

even mirrors what Hirsch (2014) quotes the poet Russel Edson as saying, that he “always

sought… ‘a poetry freed from the definition of poetry, and a prose free of the necessities of

fiction’” (490). As Chu led the movement to re-invent Korean poetry, his experimentations with

form and content display a desire to be freed from the definition of poetry, yet not so much as to

33

become fiction. I don’t think it’s an accident that the very first poem that was published on the

very first page of Ch’angjo is one that breaks so much with established Korean poetry, as well as

with standard Western poetic forms. Following this poem, the remainder of Chu’s poems return

to a verse format, yet “Pulnori” stands as a clear break between culturally established poetic

forms and the ‘pure’ literature that Ch’angjo purports to offer and sets the stage for the other

prose poems included in Ch’angjo—which are mostly translations.

In the final issue of Ch’angjo, Chu Yo-han published his poem “Pyǒl mit e honja sǒ” or

“Alone under the stars”. This poem is interesting to examine, especially next to his first work

“Pulnori”. Structurally they have very little in common. “Pulnori” is a prose poem that doesn’t

utilize lines or verses, whereas the form of “Pyǒl mit e honja sǒ” conforms to more typical poetic

verse standards. “Pyǒl mit e honja sǒ” reads almost like a song, with verses and a repeating

chorus between each verse. In fact, the poem’s narrator is singing a song—which is what the

‘chorus’ portion of the poem is. This poem shows a reversion to a more Sijo style, as Sijo poetry

was often very rhythmic and meant to be sung. Sijo—a Korean poetic form with a long

tradition—was typically much shorter in length than Chu’s poem, but if you look at just the

chorus, or the song that is being sung by the poem’s lamenting narrator, it can be taken for sijo

itself.

“The river water flows, flows, as I have taken on the years

For him whom I left atop the mountain, I have shed not one tear

The river water flows, flows, as I have taken on the years.”

(Chu, 19217)

This chorus repeats three times in the poem, with only the middle line changing each time.

With Sijo, poems were composed of three lines, and were often sung by kisaeng8 or by the

scholars who had composed them. This sung chorus, marked even within the poem as being sung

as the narrator notes “I sing, alone, a plaintive song” in the first verse, shows how Chu was

attempting to take established Korean forms and incorporate them into his vision for modern

7 All translations are my own unless otherwise stated

8 Kisaeng were women, either orphaned or of low birth, who were well versed in music and arts. Their vocation was

to entertain noblemen through art, music, and conversation.

34

Korean poetry. While the two poems diverge in form, their many thematic similarities such as

death, loss, nature, and hope connect them. Thus, though the form of Chu’s poetry changes

dramatically between the first and last issues of Ch’angjo, thematically, his poems continue to

invoke similar sentiments and undertones, always trying to end on a hopeful note in his attempts

to refrain “from falling into the decadent mood of the times” (Kim 1994, 18). The Ch’angjo

poems also highlight representations of the poetic self, and notions of poetic subjectivity.

Chu’s shifting poetic form, Ch’angjo’s use of images including photographs and cover art,

the changing type faces, and experimentations with type orientation to create grids and artistic

layouts, are all examples of this forward press to incorporate modern forms into Korean

literature, interweaving them into landscapes of Korean culture. This is exemplified in the coterie

members’ maintaining syllabic structure and vertical type orientation while at the same time

opting for a morpho-phonemic orthography, including photographs of authors with some in

Western dress and others in the emblematic white Korean dress, and incorporating illustrations

and printed visual art next to the written word in order to emphasize their joint presence in the

aesthetic sphere. All of these material steps operate to show that Ch’angjo, while working to

place Korean literature on a global level, did so oftentimes by translating the global into the

local.

35

The Korean language in Ch’angjo

After peeling off Ch’angjo’s material layer, one of the things that is immediately exposed

is the language being used. Ch’angjo was published during a great transition in Korean writing

and was in fact instrumental in cementing these linguistic changes within modern Korean

literature. At this time, most professional writers were writing in the Japanese language and

publishing in publications printed under the authority and approval of the Japanese imperial

government. While other Korean language publications existed, Ch’angjo prided itself that all its

pieces were written in Korean, with no contributors writing in Japanese or Classical Chinese.

While its works still contain a lot of Sino-Korean characters (hanja), the grammatical structure

follows Korean syntactic patterns as opposed to those of Classical Chinese. Ch’angjo was by no

means the only magazine written in Korean at the time, but the numbers were low. Furthermore,

the works of Ch’angjo, in purporting to be modern literature, not based on Chinese models and

written in the Korean language, also incorporated elements of the Western European and Russian

examples that the authors took to be the epitome of ‘pure’ literature. This incorporation could

only be accomplished using a phonetic writing system that more closely paralleled spoken

language. This movement towards phonetic orthographies began long before Ch’angjo. In Japan,

in the latter half of the 19th Century, following the Meiji restoration, a new conception of writing

emerged known as genbun itchi—which is often translated as a unification of written and spoken

language. Karatani (1993) writes that “Genbun itchi represented the invention of a new

conception of writing as equivalent with speech” (39). Now this widely held conception was not

completely accurate, as speaking and writing are intrinsically different modes of communication

and therefore can never be truly equivalent, but one lasting effect of genbun itchi was an

emergent phonocentrism, further encouraged by the Western presence. Among some groups in

China, Japan, and Korea, this led to movements for the adoption of the Roman alphabet, but on

the Korean peninsula, which already had the advantage of an existing fully formed morpho-

phonemic orthography in the form of han’gǔl, the adoption thereof for literary purposes was

quickly agreed to, particularly by nationalist groups bent on establishing a firm concept of Korea

through its cultural difference from other East Asian nations.

This chapter investigates the linguistic innovation and experimentation that the authors

undertook in Ch’angjo, building off these vernacularization movements and the widespread

36

adoption of han’gǔl in Korean publications. The pieces in this publication demonstrate the early

effects of an accelerated period of growth and development in written Korean that took place

between the “early modern Korean” of the late Chosǒn period and the “contemporary Korean”

that is now in wide use. In the first part of the chapter, we look at the orthographies used in

Ch’angjo and their patterns across the different genres. We then turn to the effects of the East

Asian vernacularization movements on Ch’angjo as well as its contributions to efforts to

standardize written Korean. Finally, we analyze Ch’angjo as a translingual conduit which helped

further establish newly imported terms and ideas within the Korean semiotic repertoire.

3.1. Orthographic choice and distribution

Prior to Chu Si-gyǒng’s coinage of the name han’gǔl (the writing of the Han) in 1913, the

Korean orthography, created by King Sejong and his scholars in the 15th Century, was referred to

as ǒnmun (vernacular/vulgar writing). Up until the end of the Chosǒn Dynasty, scholars wrote

exclusively in Classical Chinese and left ǒnmun to the women and peasants. However, in the late

19th Century, following their release from obligations to China through the Treaty of

Shimonoseki, many Korean scholars and political activists embraced ǒnmun to express a sense

of nationhood separate from the Chinese tradition. One of the first publications to adopt ǒnmun

was the Independence Club newspaper, Tongnip Sinmun, which ran from April 1896 to

December 1899; many others followed suit. In 1917, Yi Kwang-su’s Mujǒng became the first

modern Korean novel, as it was published entirely in han’gǔl and utilized many new stylistic

methods, and in 1919, Ch’angjo declared itself to be the first literary coterie magazine of ‘pure’

literature, adopting wide—though not exclusive—use of han’gǔl in all pieces published. A

mixture of han’gǔl, Sino-Korean characters, and Roman letters are used in Ch’angjo.

In general, most of the writing is written vertically, being read from top to bottom and

moving right to left, as was typical of both Classical Chinese and Japanese writing. However,

there is also variation in the writing orientation and the positions of the writing on the page

depending on whether what is being presented is a literary piece, an advertisement, or an

organizational page, such as the title page, table of contents, and portrait page. As mentioned in

the previous section on materiality, advertisements often changed the orientation of words and

phrases to create visual variation and effect, often in the form of a grid. Cover pages also shift

between horizontal and vertical writing, but are always read right to left, with the spine of the

37

magazine itself being on the right, as was standard for all Chinese, Japanese, and Korean

literature at the time. Even within the literature there is slight variation on text layout based on

genre. The majority of the literary pieces in the earlier issues are structured with two sections on

each page—see Figure 18—following the page layout style of other contemporary Korean

magazines from the late 1910s, like Yǒjagye (Women’s World) and Hakchigwang (Lux

Scientiae). However, there are some pieces that utilize different text flows by dividing the page

into three sections—generally poetry as in Figure 16—or printing the text in one long section,

letting the vertical text extend from the top to the bottom of the page—see figure 17. The choice

of text flow seems to be somewhat arbitrary. Particularly if you consider Figures 17 and 18,

which are two sections of the same novel. The portion of “Oh the frail-hearted” from issue five is

split into two sections, whereas the continuation of the same novel in issue six is all combined

into one long section per page. However, it is noteworthy that as the issues progressed, more and

more prose pieces are published in the single section per page format, demonstrating that perhaps

it was an innovative choice made by some of the authors as they experimented with new styles in

both writing and formatting. This tendency towards single sections is echoed in other

publications that were being published in 1920 and 1921 such as Hyǒndae (The present era) and

Figure 18: First page of Kim

Tongin's novel "Oh the frail-

hearted" from Ch'angjo issue 5,

text divided into two sections per

page.

Figure 16: Kim Chong-sik's

poetry "Nangin ǔi pom" from

Ch'angjo issue 5, text divided

into three parts per page.

Figure 17: First page of part II of

Kim Tongin’s novel “Oh the frail-

hearted” from Ch’angjo issue 6.

All text in one section per page.

38

Sǒul (The Seoul), as well as slightly later publications like Sinyǒsǒng (New Women). Even the

aforementioned Hakchigwang (Lux Scientiae) eventually started printing many of their pieces in

full-paged sections, though not until the latter half of the decade. The shifting writing layout of

Ch’angjo in the later issues is therefore indicative of a shift in writing layout as a whole in

Korean writing during the early 1920s.

While the writing format in Ch’angjo typically followed established patterns, its

orthographic choice of using a mixed script that tended to be more heavily han’gǔl, was one

factor helping to secure its place among the foundational publications of modern Korean

literature. As seen in the pages of Ch’angjo, during this innovative period, a lot of literature was

written in mixed script with more Chinese characters found in certain genres than in others. For

example, in Ch’angjo’s very first piece, Pulnori (Fireworks), Chu Yo-han’s prose poem, in the

first paragraph only three Sino-Korean characters are used. However, in Chǒn Yǒng-t’aek’s

essay “Complaints”, the first paragraph includes 20 characters. Both first paragraphs are of

similar lengths, but the non-fiction genre shows a tendency towards increased character usage

that stays true across other pieces in the publication as well. The main difference lies in content

words—words that convey meaning rather than structure, predominately nouns, verbs, and

adjectives. In works of poetry and fiction, the style tends to be more informal, with words

selected to resemble the spoken vernacular more closely, as the authors tended to adhere to

vernacularization movement norms in these two genres. As such, many of the content words are

native Korean words and therefore do not have associated Chinese characters. Many fiction

writers also simply opted not to use any characters for words whose meaning could not be

confused in the given context, and only used characters for clarification purposes—as Yi Kwang-

su did in the inaugural modern Korean novel Mujǒng. The non-fiction categories of essay,

critique, travel writing, etc. employ a more scholarly register. They are not written in Classical

Chinese, as the syntax and use of morphology are unmistakably Korean, however, many of the

content words lean towards the academic and are therefore more likely to be Sino-Korean words

with associated Chinese characters. One of the main modern critiques of Ch’angjo is associated

with this use of mixed script or kukhanmunch’e. Ch’angjo is intended to be a work of modern

Korean literature, written on behalf of the Korean people or kungmin, yet its use of mixed script

makes it incomprehensible to those who are not versed in both han’gǔl and Sino-Korean

characters, notably women, children, and farmers (Kwŏn 2012, 152). Thus, the orthographic

39

choices made by Ch’angjo’s authors limited its readership to “a small number of literary-minded

individuals” (Lee 2015, 82). This paradoxical orthographic use which continued the historical

privileging of the educated elite exemplifies this moment in Korean literature’s transition to

han’gǔl, a moment in which the idea of a Korean script was still very much in flux, and very

inclusive of ‘non-Korean’ elements.

Han’gǔl and Chinese characters are not the only orthographies found in the pages of

Ch’angjo. Sometimes what at first appears to be Sino-Korean characters are actually Sino-

Japanese characters acquired by the authors through either the influence of Japanese Imperial

authority on the Korean peninsula or through the authors’ Tokyo-based higher education.

Though less common, the Roman alphabet is also scattered through some pieces published in

issues of the magazine. The first instance that we see of the use of the Roman alphabet is in the

first issue within the first page of Kim Tongin’s novel “Yakhan cha ǔi sǔlp’ǔm” (“Sorrow of the

weak”). The main character Elizabeth is going to visit a friend and must pass through certain

places in Seoul, rather than naming the places, Kim writes “…N 通, K 町 等을 지나서…”,

which roughly translates as “passing through N street, K town, etc…” (Kim 1919, 53). This nine-

syllable phrase is interesting on both orthographic and etymological levels. Orthographically

speaking, without combined knowledge of han’gǔl, the Roman alphabet, Sino-Korean characters

(hanja), and Sino-Japanese characters (kanji), it becomes incomprehensible. N and K are Roman

letters standing in for the names of places, censored to avoid geographic specificity as is

common in Western European literature, particularly during the 19th Century. The first two

characters 通 and 町 are characters for street and town, pronounced t’ong and chǒng respectively

in Korean. Yet, they are more closely associated with the Japanese tsu (through) and machi

(town), most likely the influence of Japanese colonialism on urban layouts and the author’s

Japanese education. The third character 等, if read as deng taking the Chinese meaning of the

character, means ‘wait’. However, in Japanese it can be used as a plural marker ra. When used in

a Korean context, it can pronounced as either dǔng or dǔl, closer to the Chinese pronunciation,

but semantically its meaning is closer to the Japanese, meaning something akin to ‘et cetera’ with

the first pronunciation and the Korean plural marker if it’s the second. The han’gǔl particle 을

(ǔl) marks the grammatical object, and 지나서 (chinasǒ) is the verb indicating movement

through the previously expressed nameless street and town. With these nine syllables we see the

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multiplicity of linguistic influences working on Korean writing during this time, another

indication of the globality that is being localized in Korean literature at various structural levels.

In this simple phrase we see the influence of the West through the use of Roman letters, along

with the typically 19th century European Romantic practice of avoiding geographic specificity,

yet this influence is interwoven with markers of the Japanese occupation and historical remnants

of a long history of Chinese influence. All of these different orthographies, however, are placed

within the Korean grammatical structure, marked with a Korean particle and ended by a Korean

verb. This is indicative of the process that the authors have pioneered in Ch’angjo as a whole.

Pieces and influences from global sources are woven into the existing tapestry of Korean

language and culture.

Another interesting piece for orthographic analysis is Kim Hwan’s “Misullon” (“Theory of

art”). It is split into two parts across issues four and five. In the first half of his theoretical work,

he elucidates his theory of the great meaning of art, broken down into 13 parts. For the first few

pages, he follows the standard structure adhered to by most of the other contributors who write

essays, critiques, or travel literature using Chinese characters predominantly for content words

and han’gǔl to convey function words—words that provide syntactic structure to an utterance,

generally prepositions, case markers, conjunctions, etc. However, in the fourth section of his

theorizing, entitled “Misul kwa chayǒn” (Art and nature), we suddenly encounter the word

“inspiration” written in the Roman alphabet in the middle of a mixed script sentence, with the

Sino-Korean character given in parentheses after the English word. Throughout the rest of this

first part and into the second, Kim Hwan continues to intersperse Roman letters, English words,

and names of various scholars, writers, and artists written in the Roman alphabet throughout his

theory of art. The multilevel organizational headings in the second part of Kim Hwan’s “Theory

of Art” essays even utilizes a mixed orthography with the first level using the order of the

han’gǔl graphemes (가, 나, 다…) and the second level using capitalized Roman letters (A, B,

C…). The insertion of words and names in the Roman alphabet adds another layer of complexity

above the incorporation of a simple letter. The orientation of languages written in the Roman

script is quite different from that of Korean. Han’gǔl was specifically designed by King Sejong

and his scholars to work in conjunction with Chinese characters, but not with the Roman script.

At the time of Ch’angjo’s publication, written Korean was still oriented vertically, read top to

bottom, moving from right to left, while the Roman script is written horizontally moving from

41

left to write. The solution used by Kim Hwan was to turn the roman-scripted word 90 degrees

clockwise so that it aligned vertically, but still technically read from left to right. This allowed

the words to fit in line with the surrounding han’gǔl and Sino-Korean characters, while

maintaining its legibility for those who were able to read the Roman alphabet, further

incorporating foreign orthographic influence into established local form.

Kim Hwan, in his elucidations on the history of art and its role in various facets of life,

science, and civilization, necessarily includes influential names like Diego Rodriguez de Silva y

Velasquez, Leonardo da Vinci, Aristotle, Albrecht Durer, G.W. Friedrich Hegel, Charles Le

Brun, etc. In the text, the majority of these names are listed using standard East Asian name

order, with the surname preceding the remaining name(s). However, Leonardo da Vinci is listed

with Leonardo coming first. Capitalization, spelling, and spacing are also sometimes flawed

ignored or misused. Spanish artist Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez is cited as “Velasquez,

Diego Rodriguez desilva Y.”, French artist Charles Le Brun is named as “Le Brun charles”,

Albrecht Dürer is “Dürer, Arbrecht” and in part 11 of his first essay, we encounter the word

‘Doricorder’, referring to Doric order, one of the three Greek architectural orders. This is not a

criticism of Kim Hwan’s ability to utilize the Roman alphabet to the standard subscribed to by

each individual European language, but rather to point out the relative novelty of inserting

Roman-written words and names into Korean writing. Kim Hwan’s use of these names is not

merely listing them as examples of artists, but rather he quotes many of them, including Hegel

and Dürer as he sets out his theory of art. He is also operating not just among English names and

patterns, but trying to incorporate Spanish, French, German, Italian, Romanized Greek, and more

into a single orthographic structure. Also, at this point in time, the knowledge that Kim Hwan

had obtained through studying these European figures, was very new to Korean scholarly

writing. Therefore, there was no standard way to write these names in han’gǔl, nor were there

familiar Sino-Korean characters associated with their names. Even today, with decades of

linguistic interactions between English and Korean, there are debates about how to han’gǔlize

various English sounds with no direct Korean equivalents. Kim Hwan and the other authors of

the period would have had to make decisions how to transliterate these names based on both their

limited knowledge of all of the European languages from whence they came and the existing

Japanese transliterations of these same names, which may ultimately have opened them up to

more censure from other scholars of the time. While Kim Hwan opted to simply write the

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Roman-alphabet names, in the ninth issue, an author with the pen name ‘Kim Chǒk—possibly

Im Chang-hwa—in his essay “Myoyak” (Elixir), opted to both han’gǔlize the Roman names and

include the original names in parentheses after the name. Other names that do not originate from

languages that utilize the Roman alphabet, like Turgenev and Tagore, are generally only found in

han’gǔl. Another method of han’gǔlization is seen in Kim Tongin’s “Oh the frail-hearted!”

through the transliteration of the English word ‘coffee’ as “커—피—” (k’o—p’i—), with

accompanying diacritic strokes to the right of each syllable to signify it as a foreign borrowing.

This mimics the transliteration style of Japanese, in which ‘coffee’ is transliterated as “コーヒ

ー” with the two long dashes symbolizing elongated vowels, an orthographic borrowing from

Japanese that was eventually phased out in Korean. This is indicative, as Lydia Liu elaborates in

her book Translingual Practice (1995), of the role of Japanese as a conduit through which new

vocabulary and language flowed into Chinese and Korean, while some new words required the

assignment of new meaning and nuance to existent terms, others required transliteration. Kim

Tongin and his fellow Korean authors took these transliterations as models for han’gǔlization as

they adapted phonetically and orthographically foreign words and concepts into Korean written

structure.

The pages of Ch’angjo show the ambivalent nature of orthographic choice during this time

in Korean writing. While most of the writers who contributed to Ch’angjo were also supporters

of and participants in the independence movements, they recognized that it was impossible to

express what they wanted to express by limiting themselves to only the Korean portion of their

semiotic repertoire. As those who were born and raised on the Korean peninsula, educated in

Japan, and familiar with art, literature, and social theory coming into Japan from around the

world, they needed to be able to translanguage in order to fully express their ideas (Liu 1995).

This translingual practice was not limited to their syntactic and lexical choices but extended into

to their orthographic choices as well. The variety and versatility of orthography in Ch’angjo may

seem odd given that it was to be a vehicle for the creation of modern Korean literature. With this

in mind, however, it is interesting to note that in using various orthographies from both East and

West, the mission of the authors was not to make the Korean language fit the orthographic

structure of the languages of origin, but rather to take this world of orthographies and reposition,

transliterate, and adapt them until they fit into the Korean linguistic mold, forming yet another

example of the localization of global forms in this little magazine.

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3.2. Korean vernacularization and standardization

The vernacularization movements that swept through Korean, Chinese, and Japanese

literature in the early 20th century were not attempts to simply write as they spoke, as the word

‘vernacular’ might imply. In East Asia, vernacularization partially ties back into orthographic

choice, as to East Asian writers, vernacularization was the unification of the written and the

spoken. Chinese characters, as an ideographic script rather than a morpho-phonemic script,

allowed the conveyance of meaning, but this meaning didn’t have any intrinsic phonetic link to

the verbal representations of these ideas within the thoughts and languages of the writers. A

poem written in Classical Chinese could be understood in Qing China, Chosǒn Korea, and Meiji

Japan, but it would not be read the same way. Writer Futabatei Shimei wrote of the need to

vernacularize, “how pathetic that writing alone should have its cheeks crammed full of stiff,

mold-sprouting gobbledygook, or a mouth dripping from drool from learning to speak with an

immature tongue” (Futabatei in Levy 2006, 23). In this characterization, written language, not

being representative of smooth, spoken language, was stiff and immature. Thus, written language

and spoken language needed unification in order to expand and rejuvenate the written word and

authors’ abilities of “expression”. “Before this time, no one spoke of literature in terms of

expression. It was the identification of writing with speech which made such a concept possible”

(Karatani 1993, 40). By advocating for a form of writing which allowed the phonetic expression

of the author’s language, the ability to write as expression came about, though, as demonstrated

in the previous section the identification of written Korean with spoken Korean was never fully

realized in practice, as was also ultimately the case in China and Japan. In China, just a few years

before the publication of Ch’angjo, the first of two major alphabetization movements began.

This “Chinese Romanization movement” was a prime example of the phonocentrism that was

gripping East Asia during the time that Ch’angjo came into being (Zhong, 2019). With China

losing faith in its own ideographic writing system, Korean and Japanese writers were sure to do

the same, aided by China’s weakening cultural grip on East Asia and the rise in European

influence. According to Karatani (1993), what was taking place at the time “was not the actual

abandonment of Chinese writing but rather a profound undermining of the privileged status of

writing (as kanji), which was accomplished through advocating an ideology of phonetic speech”

(51). The vernacularization movement had this widespread effect in both Korea and Japan, and

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to a certain extent in China itself, of restructuring the orthographic hierarchy to privilege more

phonetically based graphemes.

Karatani traces the origins of the genbun itchi movement and other literary innovations in

Meiji Japan to the movement to reform drama, and specifically to the actions of the actor

Ichikawa Danjūrō, whose innovative techniques set him apart from other actors of the time. Most

notably, he “stopped applying powder to his face in the exaggerated manner of the traditional

theater and he resuscitated patterns of ordinary speech” (Karatani 1993, 55). This initial instance

of stripping away adornment and ornamentation allowed audiences to see the ‘real’. This same

thing applied to speech and writing, by stripping away the traditional adornment of Chinese

characters and literary stylistic devices, the remnant, the vernacular script, in bearing a phonetic

resemblance to actual speech, evoked feelings of authenticity.

“Once a phonocentric ideology of language had been adopted, however, even

when kanji were used, their meaning was subordinated to sound. Similarly, the

conception of the face came to be that of the naked face as a kind of phonetic

cipher, meaning was then constituted as an inner voice recorded and expressed

by the face. The Japanese discovery of realism and interiority was thus

profoundly linked to the genbun itchi movement.” (Karatani 1993, 57)

This sense of realism and interiority was then passed down to other generations of writers.

By the time Kim Tongin, Chu Yo-han, Kim Hwan and Chǒn Yǒng-t’aek became acquainted

during their time studying in Japan, much of Japanese literature had already embraced the

concept of genbun itchi, therefore in their studies of literature, these Korean writers would

necessarily have encountered the concept and allowed it to inspire and evoke a sense of

authenticity in their own writing. That Korean writers in Japan adopted this prevailing attitude of

phonocentrism in their own works is especially apparent in Yi Kwang-su’s Mujǒng (1917). Yi

writes almost entirely in han’gǔl, yet when he does employ Sino-Korean characters for meaning

clarification, the han’gǔl rendering of those characters is given first with the characters

themselves being relegated to parentheses following the han’gǔl—e.g. “김장로의 딸 선형(善

馨)이가” (Yi 1917)—thereby privileging the phonetic script over the Sino-Korean characters

even when they are present in the prose. The authors of Ch’angjo did not all follow this pattern,

though many did, and for those who opted not to give the han’gǔl equivalents of Sino-Korean

45

characters, the syntactic structure and use of grammatical function words written in han’gǔl still

worked to vernacularize their writing to a more phonocentric style.

As mentioned in the previous chapter there is an image at the end of the last two issues of

Ch’angjo which contains han’gǔl deconstructed from its typical

syllabic blocks—Figure 19. Read clockwise starting at the top, the

graphemes spell out ㅊ ㅏ ㅇ ㅈ ㅗ ㄷ ㅗ ㅇ ㅣ ㄴ (ch’ a ng j o t o ng

i n), or Ch’angjo Tongin, which is the name of the literary coterie

formed by the contributors to Ch’angjo. From a vernacularization

standpoint, the most notable thing about this construction is the

omission of the silent ‘ㅇ’ in front of the ‘ㅣ’, which would be

impossible in the syllabic block form of standard Korean. In Korean, the ‘ㅇ’ grapheme

represents the ‘ng’ nasal sound when placed at the end of a syllabic block. However, when a

syllable begins in a vowel, the ‘ㅇ’ grapheme is merely a place holder, a zero consonant, used to

fill out the syllable. As the ‘ng’ sound cannot be made at the beginning of a syllable, it is always

clear within a written syllable whether it is the ‘ng’ sound or the zero consonant. In the symbol

on the back of issues eight and nine, this silent ‘ㅇ’ was omitted, and the word written out

grapheme by grapheme without any imitation of the form of Sino-Korean characters. The

spelling of Ch’angjo Tongin in this manner utilizes the phonemic level of the han’gǔl, without

making it compatible with Sino-Korean characters as was and is typically standard.

Orthographic choice and vernacular style vary from piece to piece within the pages of

Ch’angjo highlighting this time period as one in which the standardization of written Korean as a

legitimate form of literary and scholarly expression was in its early days. Various standardization

movements at both public and government levels took place throughout the rest of the colonial

period and into the first few decades of division, and while not all of the experimental techniques

tried within the pages of Ch’angjo were adopted as standard across written Korean, some of the

innovations tried in Ch’angjo and other contemporary publications had a permanent impact on

the standardization of written Korean.

The spelling conventions in Ch’angjo highlight its place in the transition between early

modern Korean and modern Korean. There are many instances where words are written exactly

as spoken rather than being confined to the spelling conventions that are now firmly fixed in

Figure 19: Seal on the

back of Ch’angjo issue 8

46

Korea. For example, in many pieces in Ch’angjo, you will find the modern Korean word 같이

(kat’-i) written as ‘가치’ (ka-ch’i) following its phonetic pronunciation, and ‘없다’ (ǒps-ta)

written as ‘업다’ (ǒp-ta) without the silent ‘ㅅ’ (s). Re-syllabification which in contemporary

standard Korean takes place in pronunciation rather than in conventional spelling, is often

demonstrated through spelling in Ch’angjo—e.g. you will find ‘잇스며’ (is-sǔ-myǒ) rather than

‘있으며’ (iss-ǔ-myǒ) in Choe Sǔng-man’s “Pulp’yǒng” and ‘미테’ (mi-t’e) rather than ‘밑에’

(mit’-e) in Chu Yo-han’s “Pyǒl mit’e honja sǒ”. It can therefore be said that through the

influence of the vernacularization movements, Korean writing at this time may have been closer

to spoken pronunciation than the standard conventions that were eventually agreed upon after the

vernacularization movements waned. The authors, in utilizing a phonetic orthography strove to

fully adapt Korean writing to their own local pronunciation. It is beyond the scope of the present

thesis, but it would be interesting to analyze the spelling conventions of each individual author to

see if there are dialectal agreements between the spellings used by groups of authors from similar

areas. Demonstrable patterns of this would provide even stronger evidence for a strict adherence

to the idea of phonetic representation as vernacular. As the majority of the authors are from

P’yǒngan province, evidence of their dialect can already be seen in word choices scattered

throughout the magazine—e.g. 얼그망이 (ǒlgǔmangi), P’yǒngan dialect for 얼금뱅이

(ǒlgǔmbaengi, a person with a weathered face), is used in Chu Yo-han’s “Pyǒl mit’e honja sǒ”,

and ‘머구리’ (mǒguri), a common northern word for 개구리 (kaeguri, frog) is used in Kim

Tongin’s “Sorrow of the weak”. It would stand to reason that if they were truly adhering to

phonetic representations, any pronunciation differences would also assert themselves between

the group of authors from P’yǒngan and the much smaller group of authors from the Seoul area.

Beyond orthographic and spelling conventions, however, syntactic patterns also begin to emerge

in the works of Ch’angjo.

Kim Tongin’s writing is notable, as previously mentioned, for its use of plain-formal style.

The complex Korean verb system includes both honorifics and different speech styles. While

many other pieces printed in Ch’angjo opted to use formal deferential style—also referred to as

high formal style—in Kim’s works, the narrative is told predominately through the use of plain

formal style (haerach’e)—sometimes referred to as low formal style (Im, Hong, & Chang 2010,

73). However, Kim Tongin did not innovate the use of this style in his novels’. Yi Kwang-su also

47

famously opted for this style in Mujǒng (Heartless), which had been published two years prior to

the publication of Ch’angjo’s first issue. This trend of losing honorifics and deference in writing

style was also happening simultaneously in early modern Japanese literature as part of the

genbun itchi movement. Both Japanese and Korean are languages where the ending of the verb is

determined by both the subject of the sentence and the relationship between the speaker and

listener. While Kim and those who followed a similar style of writing opted for a low/plain

speech style, they still chose formal over informal. This pattern has remained up to the present,

with most authors opting for this plain formal style in their prose, whether it be fiction or non-

fiction.

This linguistic shift was indicative of a much larger social shift occurring simultaneously.

Following the end of the Chosǒn Dynasty and the beginnings of the conception of Korea as a

modern nation-state, there came a dismantling of the established social hierarchy. The

vernacularization movement in Japan is said to have begun at the urging of American Christian

missionaries to abandon Chinese characters in favor of more accessible writing. According to an

1866 petition to the Tokugawa Shogunate written by Maejima Hisoka, the abandonment of

Chinese characters would allow education to be more accessible to all realms of society

(Karatani 1993, 45). This ideology in which education should be more widely available also

entered Korea as the established social hierarchy was breaking down. The introduction of new

modern social orders necessitated new language use to be able to describe this new order.

According to Yi Kwang-su, “a novel portrays an aspect of life in a refined and righteous manner.

It depicts its author’s imaginative world as clearly as possible so that its readers can perceive the

world realistically”9 (Yi 2011, 303). In order to accurately reflect the changing social hierarchy,

it was necessary for authors to change the language they were using, specifically the language

that was intrinsically linked to the previously adhered-to social structure, namely honorific levels

and formal verb endings. It is useful to remember, as Karatani pointed out, that vernacularization

was not really an alignment of speech and writing as is often touted, but rather a privileging of

phonocentric orthography (Karatani, 1993, 47). The vernacularization movement did not change

the written style of Korean, Japanese, or Chinese languages to reflect the ways in which people

9 Translation by Jooyeon Rhee

48

were speaking, as in spoken Japanese and Korean, variations of tone, formality, and style were

still heavily influenced by social relations and therefore are constantly changing in any given

speech act. Rather, in a narrative without a strict social hierarchy between writer and reader,

these changes based on relationship did not occur, and therefore one consistent speech level

could be utilized throughout the text. While informal speech endings became standard, generally

the changes in writing during vernacularization were more focused on the fronting of phonology

rather than on accurate representation of spoken syntax and lexical forms.

Zur (2017) echoes Kwŏn (2012) in asserting that the use of new verb endings as well as

new narrative points of view served their purpose of establishing new modes of literature. These

new structural components created “a space of interiority by distancing the narrator from the

objects of his narration” (Zur 2017, 195), thereby constructing a narrative space in which the

subject could be realized. Zur also asserts that these efforts to standardize the use of the Korean

vernacular were intended to play on the emotions of the readers as well, “the ultimate ambition

was to create an awakened national subject. Thus, at the dawn of modern Korean literature, the

bond between language, literature, and the nation was forged” (195). The efforts to standardise

the use of vernacular Korean through writing in predominately han’gǔl and utilizing new verb

and pronoun structures was the Korean response to the influx of phonocentrism in East Asia, yet

while the impetus may have been inspired by the West, the result was a localised Korean

subjectivity.

3.3. Ch’angjo as translingual conduit

We have discussed how the Korean writers of Ch’angjo, along with their contemporaries,

worked to localize global linguistic forms at both the phonetic and syntactic levels, as they used

language to create a national subjectivity that was both part of a global literary movement and

simultaneously qualitatively Korean. This same localization happened at the lexical level. Lydia

Liu (1995) analyzes this time period in East Asia, specifically through the lens of China,

indicating it as a time when translanguaging was rife. New concepts and ideas were entering into

literary and scholarly conversation, yet there were often no established ways to express these

ideas in Japanese, Korean, or Chinese. As many of these terms were disseminated throughout

East Asia through Japan. Often these lexical gaps were filled by Japanese writers and scholars

who had re-purposed existing words, usually Sino-derived words with related meanings, to

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indicate the new concepts entering into their semantic repertoires. Korean writers took the

established repurposed Sino-Japanese forms and re-translated them into Korean literature and

scholarship.

Yi Kwang-su’s 1916 essay “What is Literature? (Munhak iran hao)” was written to analyze

one of these terms, munhak (文學). From the very beginning of the essay he seeks to

differentiate the present use and meaning of the term ‘munhak’ from its historical use and

meaning which referred mainly to the study of Chinese Confucian classics. He attributes the shift

in meaning of Sino-derived terms to the vernacularization movements, which ultimately opened

up the meaning of what qualified as literature and laid the groundwork for the establishment of a

new literature, which, according to Yi, “must be written in the purely contemporary everyday

vernacular, which can be understood and used by anyone” (2011, 306)10. The new ideology,

which required the repurposing of existing language, helped to generate further experimentation

and innovation with language leading to a modernization of language and consequently

literature. “Translingual practices, such as translations, adaptations, and appropriations, including

the generalization across East Asia of the translated term munhak, were a necessary state in this

process of modernization” (Hwang 1999, 8). The modernization inspired by translingual terms

was not limited to just literature. These translingual practices required the re-negotiation of

meaning for many Sino-Korean words in order to incorporate modern Western-inspired ideas.

Liu (1995) asserts that these re-borrowings can fall into three categories: (1) words consisting of

two-character combinations that were unique to premodern Japanese and not previously a part of

the Classical Chinese lexicon—e.g. 宗教 chonggyo/religion, (2) Classical Chinese expressions

with renegotiated meanings that then returned to their source language imbued with new

ideology—e.g. 經濟 kyǒngje/economy, and (3) character combinations from modern Japanese

that had no Classical Chinese equivalent—e.g. 美學 mihak/aesthetics—(32-33). As Korean

writing followed the Classical Chinese standard fairly strictly prior to vernacularization, it can be

assumed that their borrowings followed the same pattern and were therefore absorbed/re-

absorbed into the Korean lexicon in similar ways.

10 Translation by Jooyeon Rhee

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Translingual terms were instrumental in literary movements across East Asia. Liu (1995)

states that “there are, in the history of texts, texts which are occurrences” (33). She uses this to

introduce the renegotiation of 國民性 (guominxing—kungminsǒng in Korean) to take on the

meaning of “national character” within the Chinese language, through the medium of Japan. She

cites this translingual readjustment of meaning as a catalytic event that sparked the “invention of

modern Chinese literature itself” (33). Levy (2006) asserts that the concept of modern literature

in Japan started from the translation of the Western concept of literature, through the reinvention

of the term bungaku (文学) away from “the study of written documents…the study of rhetoric

and the Confucian classics” towards the Western sense of the word “as a category of the arts that

included poetry drama, and fiction” (27). She further contends that the bloom of modern

literature was secondarily influenced by the influx of translations of literature from various

Western languages. Korean literature seems to have followed a similar pattern, and based on Yi

Kwang-su’s essay “What is Literature”, followed by many of the theoretical works included in

the pages of Ch’angjo, it would seem that in the history of Korean literature, the texts which can

be taken as “occurrences” are those which elucidate new ideas of munhak (literature) and yesul

(art)—munye for short—as foundational in establishing nation and national culture. Such

theorizing is scattered throughout the pages of Ch’angjo. In the second issue, Ch’oe Sǔng-man,

in his essay “Rǔnesangsǔ” (Renaissance), asserts the supremacy of European art and the

necessity for Korean art and literature to undergo its own renaissance—note he doesn’t propose

that Korean writers and artists copy these supposedly superior European styles, but rather that

they should have their own renaissance that allows them to rediscover and redevelop within their

own local framework in order to measure up to what Ch’oe sees of art and literature in Europe.

Kim Hwan, in his two-part theory on art “Misullon”, discusses many of these concepts

introduced through translingual lexical renegotiation. Linguistically it is interesting to note that

in the section headings, when he utilizes Sino-Korean characters whose meaning has been

redefined, they are demarcated by small circles placed to the right of each character. These

words include misul (art), chayǒn (nature), isangp’a (idealists), sasilp’a (realists), kwahak

(science), chinbo (progress), and segyeǒ (global language). Ch’oe Sǔng-man and No Cha-yǒng

also analyse this new idea of literature and art in their respective essays “Munye e taehan

chapkam” (“Impressions on literature and art”, issue four) and “Munye esǒ muǒt ǔl

kuhanǔn’ga” (“What are we looking to find in literature and art”, issue six). Many other works in

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Ch’angjo follow this same vein as the writers frame themselves as artists, and following the title

of their publication, participate in the act of creation (Lee 2015). Inspired by these new ideas,

this act of creation involves a new concept of Korean literature, through which the authors hope

to be a part of the renaissance that Ch’oe Sǔng-man asserts is necessary for the realization of a

Korean literature worthy of the global stage.

The renegotiations of meaning that took place during this time period, were instrumental in

introducing concepts of subjectivity, interiority, and nationality to the Koreans who encountered

them. Through the written works of these authors, these terms were then diffused via little

magazines and newspapers throughout the peninsula, and they eventually trickled down to be

used through all levels of society, illustrating Liu’s point that “the patterns of diffusion

sometimes prove to be just as decisive as the moment of invention” (1995, 35). The re-borrowed

words such as “kungminsǒng” (國民性, national character), “kukka” (國家, nation), “kukche”

(國際, international), “injong” (人種, ethnicity), “munhwa” (文化, culture), etc. helped to create

a sense of nationhood among the Korean people. Other terms like “munhak” (文學, literature),

“misul” (美術, art), “ch’ǒlhak” (哲學, philosophy), etc., once they embodied the European

enlightenment ideas they had been repurposed to contain, created new categories within which

writers and artists could operate, asserting their uniquely Korean language and culture though

universally recognized forms of art and literature. These global terms, combined with

orthographic and syntactic innovations, once adopted and adapted served to create a local sense

of the Korean nation, people, and spirit.

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Ch’angjo as Creation

Once the material layers of the visual and the linguistic have been pulled away, the literary

semantic layer remains. What is being written in Ch’angjo? What topics are dealt with, and how

are they discussed? Ultimately does the content dealt with in Ch’angjo reflect the authors’

mission of building a Korean literature that can stand unashamedly alongside other global

literatures? The name Ch’angjo is significant in that it is implicative of the creative intent of its

founders when they brought it into being. They aimed for creation, but not just creation in the

sense of creativity, rather they were using art and literature—which they often equate—as a

platform of construction. Through the creation of this new literature, published in a little

magazine and adapting forms and themes from global literatures, their ultimate goal was the

creation of an idea of Korea as a nation, not an extension of China or Japan, but an independent

culture and people whose literature was grounded in local language, culture, and tradition, but

simultaneously ideologically cosmopolitan, progressive, and global.

Ch’angjo was a stage for the writers’ self-development. Lee Jaeyon (2015) asserts that the

little magazines that appeared around this time were “a platform for inexperienced writers with

literary aspirations, and that this medium helped to shape the figure of a literary writer” (78). The

writers of Ch’angjo were just beginning their literary careers. Even Yi Kwang-su, who had

already written Mujǒng at this point, still had a vast career in front of him in which to develop

and hone his style and craft. Kim Tongin and Chu Yo-han were both only 18 years old when the

first issue was published. All of the writers in the various coteries worked together, accumulating

ideas of what they thought modern Korean literature should be, to set the groundwork for their

future selves as well as generations of Korean writers who came after them.

It is difficult to categorize all of the pieces contained within the nine issues of Ch’angjo

into a single historical periodization or style of literature, such as Romanticism, Realism,

Modernism, Naturalism, etc.. Elements of all can be seen interwoven through the pieces as the

authors creatively reinvent Korean literature. Lee (2015) wrote that in Korea in the early 1920s,

“would-be writers ushered in many different kinds of modern literary trends available in

translation at virtually the same time and were unable to establish a general consensus about

what constituted ‘good’ literature and what literature ‘should’ be” (80). Along with this ushering

in of translated literary trends, the conception of what characters would be like in modern Korean

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literature also required innovation. The authors did not start from scratch, however, and

according to Yang Yoon Sun, “The images of individuals in the Korean short stories from the

late 1910s and early 1920s should be viewed as manifestations of ‘translated modernity’” (2018,

424). These forms, though translated from the authors’ exposure to other national literatures,

were still new to Korean literature, but as Bulson asserts “modernism itself was always bound up

with the production of literature that would, at the time it was consumed, seem strange, shocking,

unfamiliar” (2017, 65). Through vernacularization as well, these new modes of expression were

possible, including the concept of expression itself. As mentioned in the previous chapter, for

Japanese literature, “it was the identification of writing with speech which made such a concept

possible” (Karatani 1993, 40). Thus, while in other places, little magazines were pushing the

boundaries of Realism, Romanticism, and other established forms of literature, Korea writers’

experimentation with these imported styles was their own mode of innovation and pushing the

boundaries of what had been considered Korean literature up to that point.

Ch’angjo’s contents were not limited to short novels and poetry, though those genres do

make up the majority of the works contained within its pages. Issues also include plays, travel

writing, literary criticism and appreciation pieces, as well as essays and translations. Each form

shows innovation from past versions of the same forms, not just through the orthography and

choice of written formal/informal style as discussed in the previous chapter, but also through the

authors’ choices of topics, words, allusions, figurative language, character names, and narratorial

point of view. It is also important to note that while much innovation did happen, the works

within Ch’angjo were not a clean break from past literature. There are authorial choices made

throughout the texts that still harkened back to literary styles of earlier times. This combination

of established styles based on Korean literature through to the end of the Chosǒn dynasty and

stylistic innovation based on the new forms and ideas that the authors had encountered during

their educations abroad in Japan helped to set the foundations for Ch’angjo as a literary

magazine that is localized to the Korean situation, yet globally connected to the little magazine

movement through its innovations and use of forms and literary styles aspiring to universality.

Many scholars have shown how this was a time period where the ‘self’ was discovered in

East Asian literature. Karatani talks of this time in Japanese literature as the discovery of

interiority. “The familiar naked (“realistic”) face that emerged at this time as something that

conveyed meaning, and that meaning—to be precise—was ‘interiority.’ Interiority was not

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something that had always existed, but only appeared as the result of the inversion of a semiotic

constellation […] now they had to search for meaning ‘behind’ the actor’s ordinary face and

gestures” (Karatani 1993, 57). This inward turn, the origins of which Karatani attributes to shifts

in Japanese dramatic performance, went on to affect literature through the genbun itchi

movement. These shifts were necessarily encountered by burgeoning Korean literary figures as

they studied abroad, and this sense of interiority and self is evident in their writing. Lee (2015)

discussed the keywords used by authors throughout Ch’angjo that highlight their new

conceptions of Romantic individualism—self (cha), individuality, life, spirituality, by

themselves—as well as the need for enlightenment through doing things for oneself, as

elucidated in Ch’oe Sǔng-man’s “Renaissance”. Lee (2015) also discussed Kim Tongin’s essay

about individualism in the act of creation entitled “Chagi ǔi ch’angjohan segye” (“The world

created by the self”). In her 1996 work Narrating the Self, Tomi Suzuki describes the paradigm

shift that happened in Japanese literature during this literary moment when narration in Japanese

literature began to take on the form of the self and the expression thereof, which affected similar

shifts in Korean writing as well. Kwǒn Podǔrae’s Hanguk kǔndae sosǒl ǔi kiwǒn (The origin of

the modern Korean novel), discusses this discovery of ‘ego’ (chaa) and interiority

(Naemyǒnsǒng) specifically in reference to the foundations of Korean literature in the time

period leading up to the publication of Ch’angjo, showing that the scene had already been set for

the individuality and self-exploration when the contributors of Ch’angjo set their pens to paper

(Kwǒn 2012). Thus, the developing notion of the self is a demonstrable innovation undertaken

by the authors of Ch’angjo and their contemporaries alongside other innovations that translated

globality into their local context.

In this chapter, we look at three major concepts that are present and interwoven throughout

the fiction, poetry, and essays contained in Ch’angjo: Romanticism, Modernism, and gender

archetypes. First, we look at how Korean writers interwove their localized literature with notions

of European Romanticism, particularly with themes of death, nature, and the aforementioned

concept of Romantic individualism. Then, we turn to what makes Ch’angjo modern, what sets it

apart from its literary predecessors, and what elements of the authors’ encounters with ‘the

modern’ can be seen within their works. Finally, we look at female character archetypes at this

moment in modern Korean literature. Though not exhaustive, through an analysis of the

Ch’angjo coterie’s treatment of these Romantic, modern, and gender-related topics, we can see

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the ways in which they took the global forms that they encountered through translation in Japan,

re-translated and re-wrote them into a specifically Korean context.

4.1. Romanticism

The novel as we currently conceive of it was still a relatively new form in Korean literature

at the time of Ch’angjo’s publication. Thus, it had yet to become part of literature’s natural

scene. Writing a novel was still a very deliberate act and the writers themselves were still

experimenting with different methods to find a natural novel form for Korean literature. In Kim

Tongin’s two best-known works from Ch’angjo, “Sorrow of the Weak” and “Oh the Frail-

Hearted!”, the main characters both explicitly compare themselves and their experiences to the

works of novels, giving the characters a sense of meta-awareness of their roles as characters in

an actual novel. In “Oh the Frail-Hearted!”, the main character talks about novels either to

compare the drama of his life to novels, or to analyze and critique the conceptions of the novel as

being a form of literature that seems to always revolve around love and marriage. The

protagonist ‘K’ reports a conversation he had with ‘C’, in which ‘C’ explains the current state of

Korean literature and the novel. ‘C’ states,

“ ‘Of course, there is nothing we can call literature. However, if you designate

them as literature, the so-called creations that we have now are drivel. Why are

the novels that we call novels all used as weapons of advocacy for love and

marriage? Because, like a bamboo shoot just emerging in a bamboo grove, these

novels are just editorials advocating for love and marriage, it seems that maybe

in our country, these things are considered literary novels.

“The reason for this is that when someone first applied to their work the name

‘literary novel’, it was actually just a popular novel. However, because some

creative works were all about the problem of marriage, society became addicted.

So now, even though there are occasionally people who write about different

problems, the meanness of the concepts, the narrow grasp of the scope of the

backgrounds—a problem of substance—the childishness of the descriptions, are

all truly sickening.’ ”

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“I heard what he said and answered that I felt the same. It was somewhat

dissatisfying. It was like he had said everything I wanted to say. It’s not that I

hadn’t also noticed flaws in novels before this, but because I hadn’t known

precisely what kind of flaws they were, I pretended not to notice.”

(Kim Tongin 1920, 42)

This derisive critique of the general public conception of the novel as something merely

about love and marriage highlights the author’s desire to re-direct the trajectory of the modern

novel to be about more than just love and marriage, and while it may comprise this theme, other

more important themed should be fronted. Kim, through the voice of ‘C’, notes that Korean

literature is in its infantile state, a mere bamboo shoot sprouting in a bamboo grove. Thus, in

these formative years, Kim’s novels, as well as the novels and poetry contributed by other

authors in Ch’angjo are driven by larger themes than love and marriage—though these themes

also feature in repurposed ways. Most characters ultimately find themselves on the path to

enlightenment, and the themes they encounter along the way help to lead them there—be they

love, marriage, death, nature, or any combination thereof. In this section we investigate three

major Romantic themes that help lead these characters to their moments of epiphany on their

journey towards enlightenment: death, nature, and Romantic notions of the self.

First let us look at the role of death. Death is a common Romantic theme, and one that

haunts the pages of Ch’angjo. In most of the prose fiction and even much of the poetry, the

characters either encounter death or have been affected by a death that occurs outside of the

narrative. Death in Romantic literature often acts as a turning point, a moment of awakening

after something else comes to an end. In Ch’angjo, this overarching theme of death symbolizes

many things, particularly ends and beginnings as its works are the writings of a group trying to

innovate a new national literature under the shadows of colonialism. The authors, through the

creation of a new literature are carefully manicuring a literature that intertwines elements of the

literary past and elements of Korean culture with newly encountered forms. This necessitates a

clear cut, a separation from the past through the imagery of death and emergence therefrom. In

many of the pieces that discuss death, the death is not of the main character or narrator of the

piece, but of an important adjacent character whose death has a profound effect on the

protagonist, an awakening and enlightening effect.

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Some of the more notable deaths throughout the issues are the death of Elizabeth’s unborn

fetus in “Yakhanja ǔi sǔlp’ǔm” (Sorrow of the Weak), the death of the narrator’s wife and son in

“Maǔm i yǒt’ǔnja yǒ” (Oh the Frail Hearted!), the death of the student Ch’il-sǒng in “Ch’ǒnch’i?

Ch’ǒnjae” (Idiot? Genius?), the death of the fisherman’s wife in “Paettaragi” (Boat Song), and

the death of a person referred to only as ‘nim’ accompanied by an overall sense of death and

sadness in Chu Yo-han’s poem “Pyǒl mit e honja sǒ” (Alone under the Stars). Each death is a

turning point in the story leading to a great change in each of the protagonists, even in the case of

Chu’s poem, where the death happens outside of the poem, but its effects reach throughout. In

this section however, we will focus on the death of Ch’il-sǒng in “Idiot? Genius?” and the death

of the wife in “Boat Song” as these deaths both exemplify the treatment and meaning of death

throughout the other pieces of literature in Ch’angjo.

The theme of death in “Idiot? Genius?” runs throughout the story. Chǒn Yǒng-t’aek

heavily foreshadows the death of the narrator’s student Ch’il-sǒng so that by the time it happens,

the only thing that is mildly surprising is the protagonist’s reaction. From the very moment the

main character sets foot in his boarding room in the headmaster’s home, he talks of the ghosts

that he can sense there of someone who has hanged himself or frozen to death. He eventually

learns the story of Ch’il-sǒng’s father, who like Ch’il-sǒng’s grandfather had drank and drugged

himself to death into an early grave. As Ch’il-sǒng’s father and grandfather both died young, the

reader is led to expect that Ch’il-sǒng will follow suit. The reader has thus been primed to know

that Ch’il-sǒng will die young, and they have also been primed regarding the means of his death,

as the narrator sensed the ghost of someone who had frozen to death from the moment he set foot

in his new lodgings. The title of the novel is referring to the character of Ch’il-sǒng. There are

elements of both idiocy and genius encapsulated in his character. He struggles to learn in the

formal classroom and is constantly abused by his classmates, teachers, and uncle—who is the

headmaster. He loves to take things apart and see how they work, but he is constantly thwarted in

this by authority figures. In the final lines of “Idiot? Genius?”, the narrator comments, as he

mourns the loss of Ch’il-sǒng, that at least now he is free. Death has set him free from the

beatings and restrictions and now he might do as he pleases. This comment offers hope that

when one thing ends, freedom will follow. This commentary on freedom is not surprising from a

participant in the 1919 independence movements. Ch’il-sǒng’s death is the symbolic death of a

past in which society was constrained and forced to operate within a system not built for their

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cultural genius, and the freedom that the narrator hopes for Ch’il-sǒng is the same freedom that

Chǒn hopes for the Korean people. After Ch’il-sǒng’s death the narrator leaves the school to

escape the haunting memories and guilt left by Ch’il-sǒng, but he has been permanently affected

and shaped by his encounter with this student and he moves forward a different and seemingly

improved, enlightened man following this turning point, just as Chǒn hopes the Korean people

can move on, not forgetting their past, but choosing progress rather than sitting in stagnation.

Death in Kim Tongin’s “Paettaragi” (“Boat Song”) revolves around the embedded narrative

of the old fisherman, to whom the narrator is drawn when he hears the man singing a plaintive

boat song, a song that brings back nostalgic memories of a summer spent in a village on the coast

of the Yellow Sea. The narrator finds the old man sitting atop Kija’s tomb11 and hears the man’s

sad life story. His wife was pretty, and he was a jealous husband who beat her all the time

because he constantly thought she was flirting with other men. Finally, he caught her and his

brother in what looked like a compromising position and accused them of an affair. They said

they were only in that position because they had been trying to catch a mouse, which he

eventually found out to be true, but only after he had beaten his wife and chased her from his

home. He discovered her bloated corpse the next day on the seashore and never had the chance to

apologise to her. His brother left town in anger, and the old man then became a travelling

fisherman who, at the point he meets the narrator, has been searching for his brother for 20 years

but can’t manage to find him. Prior to the death of his wife, the fisherman’s life had been a

repetition of fishing, drinking, jealous fits, and beating his wife. However, the death of the wife

inspired change in both brothers. The younger brother left, and the older brother followed,

constantly searching for his brother, a symbol of his home and people, just as the Korean people

are searching for their home and national character. As of the end of “Boat Song”, the fisherman

hasn’t found his brother, just as the idea of an independent Korea has yet to be realized. Like the

fisherman searching for himself through the image of his brother, the Korean people are still

searching for sovereignty, yet the story lives on in the sense of longing that continues with the

narrative long after he and the fisherman part ways.

11 A landmark in P’yǒngyang that supposedly houses the remains of Kija, a relative of the rulers of China’s Shang

Dynasty and supposed first ruler of Kija Chosǒn (11th Century BCE) in the northern part of the Korean peninsula.

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The setting in which the narrator hears this story is also important. He hears the story of the

fisherman in spring12, amid the celebrations of a boat festival, contrasting the sad remembrances

of the past with the blossoming spring of the present. It is also significant that the man is singing

atop Kija’s tomb. Spring is a symbol of reawakening and the narrator is closely associated with

spring, whereas the fisherman is a symbol of tradition and death and he is perched atop the tomb

of a ruler who strongly links Korean historical beginnings with Shang Chinese origins, not a link

that was popular during this period of the culturally-independent sovereign Korean state. Thus,

the fisherman and his air of death lie atop a history from which Kim Tongin hopes to separate the

new Korea, its culture, and its literature.

Not only is death a theme in fiction and poetry, but it also features in some of the essays. In

Ch’oe Sǔngman’s “Pulp’yǒng” death is defined as a lack of complaints, or those who are content

with their current state. Ch’oe asserts that it is death for a person or a society to be free of

complaints, while simultaneously setting up having excessive complaints as the catalyst of

progress. Setting up this opposition of death and progress shows that one of the Ch’angjo

authors’ uses of death was to create a contrast between progress and contentment with custom

and the past. In each piece, the deaths are something to be mourned momentarily, just as the loss

of national sovereignty and other aspects of the Korean past can be mourned, but ultimately each

piece ends with a sense of hope, renewal, discovery, and progress. In “Sorrow of the Weak”

Elizabeth realizes her own weakness and uses that knowledge as the foundation of her new

determination to be strong. In “Boat Song”, the death of the fisherman’s wife is the catalyst

needed to send him to the ocean, learning new skills and going new places as he seeks to find

and make amends with his estranged brother. After the death of Ch’il-sung in “Idiot? Genius?”,

the main character discovers his own sense of guilt in the boy’s death and he comes to

understand the world and his part in it in a different way. Based on these examples, death in the

pages of Ch’angjo is a turning point, a moment that ushers in enlightenment, an end of

stagnation and a beginning of freedom and progress, a catalyst that pushes the protagonists

12 Spring is another common theme throughout Ch’angjo. This symbol of rebirth after winter is the theme of

numerous poems, prose, and translations.

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towards self-realization and progress. The common Romantic theme of death is thus utilized in a

way that asserts Korean nationhood and cultural independence.

A lot of the deaths in Ch’angjo are accompanied by images of nature. Ch’il-sǒng freezes

under a tree, the fisherman’s wife is found drowned on the seashore. In “Oh the frail-hearted!”,

K’s wife’s madness leads her halfway up a mountain where she is found unconscious and her

illness soon culminates in her death. Much Romantic literature contains a return to nature.

Karatani’s (1993) writings on the discovery of landscape in the beginnings of modern Japanese

literature, talked about the introduction of descriptive prose and verse on the background of a

scene. Prior to this, there was no concept of landscape or descriptions of nature as it generally is.

Literature that dealt with natural wonders instead focused on using stylized language to describe

famous places, usually in travel literature (Karatani 1993, 52). However, this new focus on the

natural background to all life allowed for more Romantic description of natural backgrounds, not

just those famous landmarks that lyrical poetry had dwelt on for centuries. Just as in a painting,

the painting’s subject is visible against a background, in early colonial Korean literature, through

description, the settings in which characters are operating come into view. But the concept of

nature as used in early 20th century literature was an imported one. Before the term chayǒn was

re-imported into Korean with the Western nominal meaning of ‘nature’ through the translingual

practices of the early 20th century, it was already widely used in Korea. According to Kwŏn

(2001), prior to the change in meaning, chayǒn was used in the adjectival sense, to mean natural,

“it was not confined to the limits of any specified existence” (389), it simply meant “by itself, or

naturally without the application of human power” (389). However, following the introduction of

the Western concept of nature, used as a noun, the use of the word chayǒn changed in Korean

literature, also affecting the way in which writers and artists viewed the worlds they were

depicting. Kwŏn (2001) notes that the introduction of the Western idea of nature led to new

imaginations of the non-human world. Nature became an entity in its own right, with its own will

and power. Kwŏn gives examples from Yi Kwang-su’s Mujǒng in which nature is described as

cold-hearted and strict (390). As authors digested this new concept of literature, it manifested

itself in their works as another god-like character set in opposition to humanity.

Nature, as this god-like entity looming in the background, plays a large role in personal

development and individual character growth in Chǒn Yǒng-t’aek’s “Idiot? Genius?”. The very

first sentence of the story reads “Even before I became an adult, there was nothing I hadn’t tried;

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I had done everything”. This confident protagonist, finding himself without work, is forced to

take up a position as a teacher in a school in a small village next to a mountain. At this school,

the protagonist’s character development is driven by moments in nature. He first meets his

student Ch’il-sǒng atop the mountain behind the headmaster’s home. He discovers that Ch’il-

sǒng is not actually an idiot during an encounter in the woods where the boy is singing as

beautifully as an angel, and ultimately the body of Ch’il-sǒng is discovered under a willow tree

along the road to P’yǒngyang. All of these moments where the protagonist’s perceptions of

Ch’il-sǒng and ultimately himself and his own intelligence and subjectivity are called into

question in nature. Chǒn is clearly experimenting with the newly introduced concept of nature as

a powerful foil to humanity, yet the entity of nature is elicited through descriptions of a typical

Korean mountain and wooded area. The author is therefore imbuing the local natural geography

with an intangible power.

Chu Yo-han’s “Pyǒl mit e honja sǒ” (“Alone under the stars”) is almost completely driven

by landscape description. In this 27-line poem, water is mentioned 18 times, stars 7 times, and

other characteristics of the natural background like the forest, sand, mountains, etc. fill the lines.

The narrator is lying in his boat under the stars, being rocked by the waves, the flow of the water,

representing the flow of time, the coming night representing the end of an era, are rushing the

narrator away from his hometown and darkening his view of his peers, his wife, his own flesh

and blood. The past is trying to grasp him through its song, the river’s flowing water and the

wind are holding his life’s breath. The water is calling him, calling on him to say something, to

sing his plaintive song, his song of the past that slips into the night. The final stanza of his sijo-

style song describes an old man with a weathered face falling into the cold hands of the water

and meeting his end. Just like in Yi Kwang-su’s Mujǒng, the nature described in “Pyǒl mit e

honja sǒ” is harsh and cruel, rushing the narrator into the dark night, demanding that he sing a

song through which the past is swept into the darkness, and the old weathered man, representing

outdated tradition, is pulled under the water to his death by the river’s cold hands. Just as in

Chǒn’s work, we can see that Chu also incorporated the Western sense of nature into his poem.

The entity of nature is a powerful opposition to the narrator who lies in his boat helpless against

the currents of nature. The depictions of nature as seen in both Chǒn’s and Chu’s works would

not have been conceivable prior to the discovery of landscape and the integration of the Western

concept of nature as a noun that works in opposition to humanity. The discovery of landscape

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and the characterization of nature in opposition to humanity required the simultaneous discovery

of subjectivity. To notice one’s background is to notice oneself as separate from the surrounding

environment. The idea of individuality, or the self as “a single example of a group” or “the

fundamental order of being” (Williams 1983 163), which had emerged in European literature

roughly a century earlier, saw its importation into East Asian literature in the late 19th and early

20th centuries. But as Yang (2017) has observed, the individual in Korean literature is very

different to its European counterpart, both in its inception and in its execution. The individual

became part of Korean literature in the transitional phase of early modern Korean literature. It

was fashioned after the European model, but it is not simply a duplication thereof. According to

Yang, “Certainly the power of Western influence was evident in Korean literary texts during this

period. Korean writers did develop new types of characters inspired by the European notion of

the individual—but not as mere imitators. They were addressing issues unique to their social and

cultural context, issues that mattered to them and their readers” (2017, 5). These unique issues

are evident both in the landscape being described, but also in the symbolism of the subjectivity

and the landscape and background that the subject is being depicted against. The unique socio-

cultural context of the Korean peninsula under Japanese colonialism, in the midst of widespread

independence movements, is reflected in the Korean subjectivity portrayed within the issues of

Ch’angjo. The translingual practices that injected new ideology into existing language enabled

Korean authors to discover their own subjectivity and create a literature unique to their kukka

(nation) and munhwa (culture) as subjects in opposition to other groups’ kukka and munhwa, as

well as to chayǒn (nature).

As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, the discovery of ‘self’ in early modern

Korean literature has been the focus of many literary scholars over the past few decades, as such

we will only briefly look into it here. This sense of ‘self’ and Romantic interiority is immediately

apparent in the fiction and poetry in Ch’angjo. The narrator of Chu Yo-han’s “Pulnori”

(“Fireworks”) establishes a sense of interiority and a sense of the self within the first stanza, as

the narrator of this prose poem laments his isolation from the people around him. “Today is the

eighth day of the fourth lunar month, Buddha’s birthday, and though I hear the sounds of people

like flowing water on the main road, why is it that, among this roar of celebration, I alone am

unable to stem the tide of tears in my heart,” he declares (Chu 1919). These lines are the second

half of the first paragraph of the first piece of literature published in the first issue of Ch’angjo

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and already we see a sense of aloneness, separation from others, and we find out about this

separation from the inner thoughts of the narrator. The poem ends with this same sense of ‘self’

separate from others, “Oh, oh, don’t let go of the present, which is your assured thing. Oh, oh,

live, live! Tonight! Your red torch, your red lips, your eyes, and also your red tears……….”

Here at the end of the poem as well, the narrator is urging the youth to live for the present,

though tomorrow itself is a guarantee, it is not a guarantee for the youth, who must therefore

seize the moment and live for the moment and themselves. These youth are representative of the

Korean people, most likely those who took part in the 1919 independence movements. Chu, who

was one of these youths, is seizing upon the subjectivity of the Korean people and calling them

to action to ensure their own tomorrow, to live. This sentiment is echoed in No Chayǒng’s essay

“Munye esǒ muǒt ǔl kuhanǔn’ga” (“What to look for in art and literature” 1920), in which he

asserts that an artist’s role is to portray the vitality of an individual. According to Lee (2015), by

representing the vitality of individual characters, the vitality will be able to be communicated to

others. Through this vitality and subjectivity of the individual, the vitality and subjectivity of the

nation can also be asserted.

At the time of Ch’angjo’s inception, the introduction of both nature and subjectivity into

Korean literature was quite new, and therefore was not treated the same way by all authors. Kim

Tongin, in various essays and stories also had much to say concerning the ‘self’, and his

characters displayed his experiments with portraying interiority in each of his pieces. In his essay

“Saram ǔi sanǔn ch’am moyang” (“The true shape of a person’s living”), he declares that vitality

can be found through the process of creation and is therefore not found in nature. In Kim

Tongin’s works, the vitality (saengmyǒng) of the artist, “can only be obtained through the hands

of men and represented by their work” (Lee 2015, 88). This shows a large break from Kim

Hwan’s assertions in his “Yesullon 1” (“Theory of Art 1”) that truth and life, and consequently

vitality, are found in nature. Kim Tongin’s notion that vitality comes through one’s own process

of creation is evident in his works. In “Sorrow of the Weak”, especially in the beginning,

Elizabeth shows very little strength of character, and as far as the story describes her, she has not

been actively involved in the process of building something with her own hands or intellect. At

the end of the story, however, Elizabeth’s realization that true strength and joy comes from the

individual’s pursuit of true love in a way redeems her character as she makes a vow to actively

make “this love the foundation of her future path,” rather than continuing to let things happen

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passively to her. This echoes the subjectivity encouraged by Chu Yo-han in “Pulnori” to seize

the moment and progress as an individual, whether it be an individual person or an individual

nation.

Just as with the previous translated ideologies that the writers of Ch’angjo wove into their

writings, they used this newly introduced notion of subjectivity to connect themselves and their

works to the global community, but they did so by establishing themselves as members of a

localized national community. The Romantic themes of death, nature, and subjectivity all

worked together within Ch’angjo’s little magazine format and its contemporary publications to

cement the foundations of an emergent Korean national subjectivity. These innovations in

Korean literature when accompanied by other newly encountered modern themes and technology

helped the authors move forward with the creation of their own artistic subjectivity.

4.2. Modernism

In describing modernism as a philosophical concept, Peter Osborne wrote that modernism

is “the name for the cultural affirmation of a particular temporal logic of negation (‘the new’, the

temporal logic of modern), modernism is the cultural condition of possibility of a particular

distinctively future-oriented series of forms of experience and history as temporal form” (2000,

57). By this assertion, things are modern by contrast, thereby creating an old/new distinction.

This sentiment is partially echoed in Karatani Kojin’s Origins of Japanese Literature as he

asserts that “landscape, as I have already suggested, is not simply what is outside. A change in

our way of perceiving things was necessary in order for landscape to emerge and this change

required a kind of reversal” (1993, 24). This change in authors’ ways of perceiving things that

took place in the late 19th and early 20th century, allowed for this contrast of old/new to take

place. The outside had always existed, but it was only through perceiving this outside—an

exteriority not limited to nature, but also to human relationships—that this new era of literature

can be perceived from our modern retrospective. It is this new gaze that typifies much of the

literature in Ch’angjo and its contemporaries and pulls it under the umbrella of modern literature.

Karatani also notes that it is only possible to ponder or imagine the existence or form of

something from within the “epistemological constellations” of our own temporality, situation and

experience. The Ch’angjo writers’ perceptions of the world around them would necessarily have

been informed by these epistemological constellations. Seeing the innovations of the past and

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present making their ways to the Korean peninsula, as well as their hopes and goals for a future

not yet realized, they combine both into their writing as they establish new narrative structures.

In the works published in Ch’angjo we see this idea of modern interwoven throughout the

narratives, the “new” painted in contrast to the backdrop of tradition, which is made “old”

through the juxtaposition. By laying new ideas over various established backdrops, through the

medium of the little magazine, the authors paint scenes that show their changed perceptions of

the world around them and their ideas for a modern Korean literature. By showing this moment

of development, as well as through their attempts at building the foundations of modern Korean

literature, writing for publication in Ch’angjo truly became an act of creation.

Some of the major areas in which these modern developments in both literature and society

can be seen are highlighted in the various works of Ch’angjo. The treatment of medicine and

mental/physical health, education, the rural urban divide, and religion are just some of the

windows through which Ch’angjo paints an image of Korean modernity during the early colonial

period. The translated literature selected for inclusion in the publication also gives insight into

the literary aims of the authors and translators beyond the confines of the Korean peninsula and

at times beyond the borders of Japanese and Western imperialism. Finally, the writing of female

characters, particularly by Kim Tongin, characterizes this moment of development in Korean

literature.

We start by looking at the role of health and medicine. In Kim Tongin’s two major pieces,

“Sorrow of the Weak” and “Oh the Frail Hearted!”, medicine plays a prominent role in portions

of the stories. In both, however, the Western concepts of both physical and psychological

medicine are evoked rather than traditional Korean medicine. This is done to conjure up ideas of

advanced development and sophistication in association with Korean geography and culture. By

marrying the idea of Korea with advances in Western medicine, Korea becomes advanced by

association. This follows the general pattern throughout all the levels of Ch’angjo in which

global concepts, and now technology, are placed in a Korean locale and take on aspects of the

Korean. The doctors themselves are Korean men, the hospitals and places of healing are staffed

by Korean people or tucked away in prominent Korean geographic locations. Therefore,

medicine is a tool used to create modern, cosmopolitan associations with the Korean people.

In “Sorrow of the Weak”, the namjak (baron), the main character Elizabeth’s employer,

arranges for her to visit a physician at a city hospital after she discovers that she is pregnant with

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his child. She catches an electric streetcar that drops her off in front of “S Pyǒngwǒn” (S

Hospital)13. When she first enters the hospital, there’s a waiting room where she has to register

with a receptionist. She waits in a chair with the namjak and is then shown to an examination

room where the doctor examines her using his stethoscope. Descriptions of the hospital evoke

feelings of the modern. Kim Tongin’s descriptions show the broad use of modern methods and

technology in the hospital. Through Elizabeth’s third person viewpoint, Kim notes the smell of

alcohol and phenol and the warm hands of the doctor as he uses his stethoscope, then prescribes

her some kind of medicine, which she thinks is going to cause a miscarriage, but instead turns

out to be some kind of health supplement, forcing her to carry on with her unwanted pregnancy.

While the hospital is modern, it is simultaneously interwoven with elements of the past,

many of which are embodied in the character of the doctor. The doctor practices Western

medicine, yet there are still many elements of the Confucian about his person. This

characterization highlights this particular moment not only in Korean literature, but also in

Korean society, when much of the modern technology and knowledge was present and had

become entrenched in society; however, mindsets entrenched in established customs remained,

particularly in regards to gender. After the male doctor examines Elizabeth, she leaves the room

while the doctor discusses her health and body with the namjak, who consequently makes all the

decisions regarding the child’s continuing existence. Because she wasn’t present during this

discussion, she doesn’t realize that the medicine given to her sans explanation is merely a health

supplement until the longed-for miscarriage doesn’t happen, days into taking the medication.

Kim Tongin doesn’t provide any sort of commentary on this arrangement through Elizabeth,

except to say “The namjak came and gave her some medicine then quickly left the hospital. After

Elizabeth received the medicine, her heart began to race. Although she wanted to take the

medicine her thoughts turning to affection towards the bottle, on the other hand she felt that there

was a curse upon the medicine and she wanted to send it to the bottom of the ocean” (Kim

Tongin 1919). This ambivalence shows that she wasn’t really sure what the purpose of the

medicine was.

13 A reference to Severance Hospital in Seoul, the first Western-style hospital in Korea, founded in the late 19th

century by American doctor/missionary Horace N. Allen.

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Elizabeth’s realization of the loss of her innocence is a key turning point in the story, and it

is as she awaits the doctor’s advice in the waiting room of the modern hospital that she has a

revelation that there is now a past Elizabeth and a present Elizabeth. Her pregnancy becomes the

moment in her life in which everything changes. Her perspective shifts as she realizes that her

expectations for the future and life as she knew it are all in the past. For the remainder of the

story, Elizabeth must then work towards finding herself and overcoming her weakness. It is not

coincidence that Elizabeth’s epiphanies about the great change her life must now undergo,

happen within the walls of a symbol of that same change within Korean society. The modern

Western hospital, reachable via electric streetcar, is a symbol of the changes that are taking place

in Korea, the new technology and knowledge that is being incorporated into Korean society and

becoming a part of it, either alongside or overlaying tradition.

Kim Tongin’s “Oh the frail-hearted” addresses illness and medicine as an even more

integral part of the plot. The male protagonist suffers from depression and has a wise friend in

whom he confides his inner thoughts. This friend acts as a type of doctor/therapist who advises

him on how best to treat his depression. Health and medicine is also called into relief at the end

of the story with the illness and death of his wife and young son. Yang’s (2018) article on this

topic is exhaustive on the significance of medicine in this particular story, but we will focus on

one particular outcome. The main character, referred to only as ‘K’, is ill and consults his friend,

‘C’, who is seemingly well-versed in Western medicine, well-versed enough to diagnose K with

the nervous disease neurasthenia. K’s illness contrasts with that of his wife. While his wife is

able to overcome the flu, she falls back into her “indigenous madness” (Yang 2018, 435) and

then dies. Yang elucidates, “The madness of K’s wife is accessible only to the colonial gaze, not

the medical gaze…K’s illness is treated as a matter of interiority…In contrast, what drives K’s

wife to insanity does not need to be analyzed or verified with the help of medical science

because it is always already externalized and obvious to everyone” (435). The cause of her

madness is that her husband has abandoned her, and in the text, it is portrayed as typical female

madness, a “Korean cultural defect” (436), while K’s depression is worthy of the medical gaze. It

is significant that at the end of the story, the wife, representing the negative sides of established

Korean customs, is dead, while her husband, whose illness is interior lives on under the non-

colonial medical gaze (437). Kim’s use of medicine to show social development and create clear

breaks between the “indigenous” past and the modern, more cosmopolitan, present shows the

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careful crafting necessary to pick out the “undesirable” parts of Korean culture and custom,

while still inserting the new technology and medical knowledge into Korean contexts using

Korean characters—e.g. the doctor and ‘C’—as well as Korean geographic locations—e.g. “S

Hospital” and the Kǔmgang Mountains. The same indigenizing can be seen in education as

depicted throughout these and other pieces in Ch’angjo.

Education features heavily in much of the fiction published in Ch’angjo. This is

understandable as many of the contributors were simultaneously studying in Japan, had recently

finished their studies, and/or had backgrounds as educators on the Korean peninsula. Education

had been an important component of East Asian cultures for centuries due to the strong

Confucian influence, which encouraged scholarly attainment and encouraged all to strive to be

educated. However, within Ch’angjo, the schools being discussed are not the Confucian schools

of the past, designed to train students to take the civil service exam, but rather schools designed

to teach students art, literature, science, mathematics, and other information necessary for

functioning in an increasingly open world. Nor is education limited to male characters; female

characters also pursue their own education and there are references to both a woman becoming

an art student in Tokyo and a female doctor in “Sorrow of the Weak”. While not all the stories,

contain scenes from the classroom, two of Ch’angjo’s most notable works, “Sorrow of the

Weak” and “Idiot? Genius?”, invoke education and educational scenes to develop their plots and

characters. The main character of “Sorrow of the Weak”, Elizabeth Kang, is a student at a girls’

school in Seoul while simultaneously working as a live-in tutor for a young boy, and Chǒn

Yǒng-t’aek’s protagonist in “Idiot? Genius?” is a teacher at a village school.

While the classroom is supposedly the place where people learn and gain deeper

understanding of various topics, it is interesting to note that although these two characters,

Elizabeth and Chǒn’s narrator, are both deeply involved in education, the points in which they

gain a greater understanding of themselves and the world do not take place in the classroom. As

mentioned in the discussion of Romanticism, the deaths of the fetus and Ch’il-sǒng help them

both to come to certain realizations, and neither of these deaths happen in the classroom. It is

only after they have extricated themselves from the classroom that they are able to understand

the world more deeply. This is especially interesting in the case of “Idiot? Genius?” as we

analyze the character of Ch’il-sǒng, who is not a conventionally intelligent person. Almost the

moment the narrator meets Ch’il-sǒng, he marks him as an idiot. Ch’il-sǒng is socially awkward,

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doesn’t speak at appropriate moments, and has never done well in conventional schooling. Yet as

we continue to learn more and more about Ch’il-sǒng, we discover alongside the narrator that he

has an insatiable curiosity. He constantly gets in trouble and gets beaten for taking and breaking

things. However, the narrator notes that he doesn’t do this out of greed or an immoral desire to

steal the property. He just sees something, is curious about how it works, and wants to take it

apart to analyze. In the final meeting in life between the narrator and Ch’il-sǒng, the narrator

both physically and verbally expresses anger at Ch’il-sǒng because another student’s lost watch

has turned up broken in his possession. Ch’il-sǒng learns through experience, and it is clear that

this trait is misunderstood by everyone else in the story until his death teaches the narrator the

value of such informal education.

Elizabeth too is forced to leave her formal schooling and role as tutor to return to the

countryside. It is only there that she learns her own weaknesses and constructs a plan to

overcome them. It is noteworthy too, that as Elizabeth leaves her education in Seoul, she returns

to a remote village, where she goes through a process of self-discovery. The scenes describing

this path of self-discovery are reminiscent of a painting that has captured a moment in time.

There is little action from Elizabeth as she simply sits in one place and observes her

environment. In one of these moments, she describes the room in the typical village house, with

rice paper affixed to the walls and rafters strung with spider webs. As she observes, she sees a fly

caught by the web, struggling to escape, then a spider emerges from an unseen place and grabs

the fly, pulling it away to die as it struggles. Elizabeth sees herself in the fly and sees her own

situation in the natural events happening before her. Ultimately at the end of the story, as she is

recovering from a miscarriage—in which she delivers the dead fetus on her own as her aunt

sleeps beside her—surrounded not by the hustle and bustle of Seoul, or in one of her classrooms,

she comes to realize that “Humans, while in this life, never ceases to fight with their weaknesses,

nor do sin and vice ever truly disappear. In order to be rid of sin and vice, you must first be rid of

weakness. And, in order to build Shangri-La, you must first rid yourself of your weaknesses.” As

she continues this line of thinking, alone, lying on the floor of the dark room under a blanket, she

finds the answers she has been looking for, coming to the romantic realization that happiness

comes from a life of love. Through Ch’il-sǒng’s, his teacher’s, and Elizabeth’s moments of

education and epiphany, we see that experience is the true teacher. Before these moments, they

have all pursued a typical classroom education, highlighting its underlying importance, however,

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the superior truths realized by these characters were discovered through experience, through

struggle, through coming face to face with hardship and overcoming.

From these two examples we can see that death, which symbolizes the end of the past and

tradition, can be a catalyst for progress, just as discussed in Ch’oe Sǔngman’s essay “Pulp’yǒng”

(“Complaints”). The form of death acts as a break from the past, and it is through these

experiences—which take place in the midst of a more rural, traditional environment—rather than

through formal education, that the characters are able to move on. So while education, as

depicted in the fiction of Ch’angjo, shows a modern style of teaching and learning with males

and females both being able to pursue formal education, this depiction of modernity is further

deepened by the author’s indications that true education and progress does not stem from within

the walls of the formal classroom, but rather through experiences that catalyze a break with the

past and a forward gaze. At the very end of “Sorrow of the Weak”, Elizabeth, having realized

that in order to become a truly strong person she must live a life of true love, declares “That’s it!

This love is the foundation of the path before me!” After this declaration, she physically rises

from her prostrate position on the floor, showing another break from her previous self, as well as

a symbolic rise above her current situation, and sees the world open before her. Thus, while

much of the education in Ch’angjo starts out in a group of students learning in a typical modern

Western-style classroom, it ends in personal realizations of the path to enlightenment, that can be

extrapolated onto a social level indicating that the darkness of the Korean experience at this

historical juncture will be but a catalyst to socio-cultural enlightenment and progress, imbuing

the Korean people with a knowledge and understanding that could not be created simply through

the new and modern “Western” experience.

The experiential education that Elizabeth, Ch’il-sǒng, and the narrator teacher received also

occurred outside of the confines of the modernized city. The treatment of this rural/urban divide

in many of the pieces in Ch’angjo enables recognition of the little magazine’s attempts to

establish a modern Korean literature through adapting various romantic and realist tropes.

According to Karatani, “It is clear, then, that realism in modern literature established itself within

the context of landscape. Both the landscapes and the ‘ordinary people’ (what I have called

people-as-landscapes) that realism represents were not ‘out there’ from the start, but had to be

discovered as landscapes from which we had become alienated” (1993:29). The true effect of

landscape is therefore the subjectivity it allows. The treatment of the rural within the pages of

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Ch’angjo demonstrates this discovery of landscapes and the consequent subjectivity of authors

who have been alienated from them during their time living in Tokyo, Pyongyang, and Seoul. In

three of the more notable works, “Sorrow of the Weak”, “Oh, the Frail-Hearted!”, and “Idiot?

Genius?”, the reader is given descriptions of the rural areas to which the main characters are

obligated to go for health or employment reasons. The characters, used to experiencing the busy

life of the city and being constantly immersed in the ‘modern’, provide detailed descriptions of

these more natural environments from which they have been alienated. Initially characters long

to return to the modern, but in the case of “Sorrow of the Weak” and “Idiot? Genius?”,

eventually they have epiphany-like moments while they are in their rural environments that

would have been impossible within the urban bustle.

As mentioned previously, the character of Elizabeth in “Sorrow of the Weak” has her

moment of enlightenment at the end of the story when she realizes that it is only through the

realization of her own weakness that she can now see the path to becoming strong. But this

realization can only be made once she has left the city. The urban environment of Seoul is full of

the modern, hospitals that practice Western medicine, schools that teach both men and women,

streetcars, friends, boys, gossip, a Western-style legal system with attorneys and judges, etc.

Elizabeth has no desire to leave the city, but following her unemployment, the only place to

which she can return is the house of a distant relative in the country village where she was raised.

She struggles both emotionally and physically during the latter part of the short novel as she

wrestles with the separation from Seoul and the future she once saw there, a failed attempt at

legal redress, as well as the health complications of pregnancy and the eventual miscarriage.

Through these struggles, however, she is able to grow. Separated from all the distractions of the

city, she has time for more interiority. Scene after scene features her sitting on the wooden floor

of the room, deep in thought, or in the courtyard, staring at grass, insects, and trees. These

moments emulate an important aspect of Kim Tongin and his fellow author’s philosophy that

while the modern technology and advancements coming in through the colonial influence were

integral in transporting the characters to specific points in these narratives, a return to nature

and/or the interior drive towards self-creation is equally as essential for self-reflection and

discovery. These moments typically occur in a culturally or geographically Korean setting,

which is consistent with their mission of taking the new and indigenizing it, interconnecting the

novel with established customs so that the global cannot operate without elements of the local.

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We see this again in “Idiot? Genius?” where it is ultimately nature that saves Ch’il-sǒng

from the beatings and derision of those around him who want him to adapt completely to the

norms imposed by this Christian-influenced school. The narrator sees the true Ch’il-sǒng when

he is in nature. While Ch’il-sǒng can’t operate normally in a classroom, here alone in the woods,

he is able to sing beautifully and construct boats to send downstream. It is through these

moments that the narrator discovers Ch’il-sǒng’s possible genius. At the end of the short novel,

this same nature takes Ch’il-sǒng from the world as he freezes to death poetically under a

weeping willow. The narrator, through the veil of his own guilt, comments that through death,

Ch’il-sǒng is now free to do as he wishes. Nature has granted him freedom through death, a

freedom that none of the human characters granted him. Nature also took Ch’il-sǒng while he

was on the road to P’yǒngyang, thinking his urban dreams would provide him with his longed

for liberty to do as he pleased free from constraint, but it was not the realization of his urban

dreams that gave him this liberty, but rather the weather’s cold grip, echoing our previous

discussion on the Romantic god-like characteristics attributed to elements of nature within the

writings of Ch’angjo.

To the educating and liberating quality of nature and the rural as displayed in “Sorrow of

the Weak” and “Idiot? Genius?” is added its healing capacities in “Oh the Frail-Hearted!”. In this

Kim Tongin piece, K, plagued by depression, is convinced to go to Mount Kǔmgang to heal.

While here, he is able to overcome his illness. The narrator describes “‘Off the main road

heading towards Changjǒn, he enters a side path toward Sin’gye Temple, and after walking along

for a while, he notices a couple of tile-roofed houses at the foot of the mountain right next to the

path. It is at this moment when he starts sensing sacred energy’”14 (Kim 1920, 42 in Yang 2018,

432). As K returns to nature, he feels the healing energies not only through the trees and the

plants, but through the tiled roofs of a mountain village and a local Buddhist temple. So, while

spending time in nature was a universal prescription for those suffering from neurasthenia (Yang

2018, 431), for K, this nature was characterized by Korean tile roofs and temples which

compounded the “sacred energy” of the mountains and aided in his healing. Through these

depictions of nature, we can see the interplay between the universal oft-depicted power of nature

14 Translation by Yoon Sun Yang (2018, 432)

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inspired by naturalist and Romantic literature and the energy of local custom, culture, and

architecture that are necessary for the continued subjectivity of the Korean protagonists against

these rural landscapes.

The energy that K feels as he passes through the Buddhist temple is indicative of the

underlying religious and spiritual notes throughout Ch’angjo’s fiction, which serve to link the

little magazine both to the newer international network of Christianity and to elements of

Korea’s Buddhist institutions. Though religion doesn’t take center stage in Ch’angjo or its

pieces, there is an underlying religious influence interwoven throughout. This is not surprising as

most of the contributing writers were Christians or had been raised with a Christian background.

Chu Yo-han’s father was a pastor and Chǒn Yǒng-t’aek would later go on to become a pastor

himself. While Kim Tongin was not a religious person himself, he had been raised in a Christian

household and some of that upbringing is apparent in his writing. The underlying influence of

religion interwoven throughout Ch’angjo is another example of the way in which the new and

the old are woven together, with the Western religious influence apparent, but subjugated to the

Korean context. Christianity is not the only religious influence present in Ch’angjo. The

influence of Buddhism, which had been on the peninsula for centuries, since around the 4th

century CE, is also present in the authors’ writings. This subtle inclusion of religious plurality

shows that the modern Korea envisioned by the authors of the Ch’angjo coterie was one in which

both established and new religious elements were present.

Kim Tongin’s works demonstrate the plurality of religious influence. In the second chapter

of Kim Tongin’s “Sorrow of the Weak”, as Elizabeth is fighting to overcome her own emotions

and anger at her friend for betraying her secret, she declares “Satan a mullǒ kagǒra” or “Get thee

behind me, Satan” from the book of Matthew 16:23, banishing her negative thoughts as those

coming from the devil. A biblical verse again emerges as Elizabeth is coming to an

understanding of herself once she has recognized her own weakness. She quotes a verse from the

Bible as she is attempting to elucidate how she can become strong through true love. She quotes

from the book of John 13:34, “A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another”

(“Sorrow of the Weak, 1919, Ch’angjo, issue 2, p. 21). These examples show the Christian

influence driving both Elizabeth’s moral compass, as well as her awakening at the end of the

piece. On the other hand, as mentioned in our discussion of the return to nature and the rural, in

“Oh the frail-hearted!”, K finds a healing sacred energy in the Buddhist mountain temple in the

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Kǔmgang Mountains. Thus, to Kim, Buddhist practice and the modern Christian influence are

both acceptable in a modernized Korea.

It is interesting to note, however, that while the intermingling of Buddhism and Christianity

is shown in a positive light, some Korean superstitions are treated quite negatively. In works by

both Kim Tongin and Chǒn Yǒng-t’aek we see the depictions of the superstitions ascribed to

unenlightened characters. In Kim Tongin, the superstitions are held by K’s wife, who is

representative of indigenous Korean culture, exemplified in her belief that if she was unable to

see her husband again before her death, “she would turn into a wandering spirit [kohon] after

death”15 and according to Yang (2018), this denotes that by Kim Tongin’s account, “the

uncivilized world that she inhabits is still under dominance of folklore and superstition: women

who die as a result of being wronged return as ‘wandering spirit[s] [kohon]’ seeking revenge.

Her illness cannot be scrutinized by scientific inquiry because it is not caused by physical or

mental problems; it is caused by the vicious traditions of Korea” (436). This is also discernable

in “Idiot? Genius?”, where at the very beginning of the story, Chǒn’s narrator exhibits

superstitious beliefs, sensing spirits of the dead who had hanged themselves or frozen to death in

the room where he is to board. At the beginning of the narrator’s journey towards enlightenment

he is superstitious, believing in hauntings and spirits, but at the end, once the death of Ch’il-sǒng

has facilitated his own awakening, his ideas of the frozen dead have changed, with Ch’il-sǒng’s

spirit “having ascended above the clouds, above the stars, believing that he will rest comfortably

in a place where he can do what his heart desires” (Chǒn 1919, 30). While not as strong a

denouncement of superstition as Kim Tongin’s description of K’s wife, Chǒn’s narrator’s

progression, from an unenlightened new teacher with superstitions of haunting spirits to an

enlightened man believing that Ch’il-sǒng’s spirit has ascended to heaven and is consequently

free and at peace, creates a contrast that casts superstition in a negative light as something to be

left in the past and equates belief in a heaven with enlightenment.

While there is no overt mention of a particular religion in Ch’oe Sǔng-man’s essay

“Pulp’yǒng” (“Complaints”), it contains references and word choices that evoke ideology of

specific religious practice while asserting a universally applicable idea. The essay talks of the

15 Translation by Yoon Sun Yang (2018, 435)

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merits of the complaint, stating candidly that complaints are the engines of progress and that if a

person or society is free from complaints it is the equivalence of death (Ch’oe 1919). He talks of

progress as a continuous pursuit made through the observation of a point of complaint and the

pursuant innovation to rectify said complaint. Combined, these innovations have led to a modern

society and will continue to push progress forward. He speaks of this progress on both personal

and social levels, reiterating that complaints are the things that help to change the environment

around us but also the person within. He writes that “complaints are plans for destruction, and

destruction implies reconstruction, thus complaints will soon become reconstruction” (Ch’oe

1919). As part of this literary magazine of Creation, Ch’oe advocates a destruction and

rebuilding instigated through the act of complaining. He advises his readers not to suppress

complaints, but to speak them freely and thereby improve themselves and their environment.

However, while much of Ch’oe’s essay is touting what appears to be a universally

applicable equivalency of complaints with progress, his writing is grounded in a more local

ideology, that of Buddhism. He begins the essay by saying that while others may consider people

with a lot to complain about to be unlucky, he considers them to be rich, because they have so

much room to create a hopeful and bright future path. Then, in his second paragraph, he makes

an internal shift. Rather than talking about a person’s life situation or their environment, he

focuses on the ego. But not the ego of Western philosophy. He writes of the so-a (小我) and the

dae-a (大我), or the relative ego and the absolute ego respectively. In Buddhist practice the

relative ego is the unenlightened ego, while the absolute ego is the enlightened ego. According to

Buddhist scholar Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki, “enlightenment is seeing the absolute ego as reflected

in the relative ego and acting through it” (2002, 41). Ch’oe references this to introduce his

different levels of progress, that of the individual and society. He mentions the progress between

the relative ego and the absolute ego and equates the development from one to the other with the

transition from a sosahoe (小社會) to a daesahoe (大社會), the characters here could be literally

translated as a small society and big society, or more likely they are a societal level parallel to

the relative/absolute egos. Thus, progress from an unenlightened to an enlightened society

requires complaints. This idea of improvement of the self and society is also a Western

enlightenment ideal, but Ch’oe uses terms from the Buddhist lexicon rather than language

brought to Korean through the vocabulary of Western enlightenment. This is particularly

intriguing as Ch’oe was actively involved in Christian groups from a young age—particularly the

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YMCA—continuing into his elderly years. As a practicing Christian, that he would use Buddhist

references in his universalist essay shows the deep cultural influence of Buddhism in Korea that

can be found manifested in his endeavor to create ‘pure’ literature. Thus, Ch’oe’s use of the local

to appeal to the universal in a global medium is an example of the localized globality that can be

found in little magazines around the world, and alongside the works of Kim Tongin and Chǒn,

stands as further evidence of the intermingling of religious practices in the establishment of a

localized idea of modern Korean religion as depicted in literature.

The religious plurality in Ch’angjo’s religious allusions is further evidence of the translated

modernity asserted by Liu (1995) and Yang (2018), on top of the previously discussed levels of

translation in form, language, and materiality. This process of translation as method for creating

a modern Korean literature is even more apparent though the actual translations published in

Ch’angjo which depict the magazine’s universalist aspirations. The nine issues of Ch’angjo

include many translations of foreign literature—predominately poetry—as well as essays in

which the Korean authors comment on foreign literature. Translations include two series of

modern Japanese poetry, featuring works by nine different Japanese poets, including Kitahara

Hakushu and Shimasaki Toson; poems by Arthur Rimbaud, Henri de Regnier, Heinrich Heine,

Goethe, Paul Fort, Rabindranath Tagore, Percy Shelley, W.B. Yeats, and others; prose poems by

Ivan Turgenev and Tagore; and a novella by Turgenev. The translations chosen for publication

give insight into which foreign authors influenced these Korean writers in their early years. The

translated authors represent a variety of styles, the idealistic, universalist humanism of Tagore,

the Romantic lyric poetry of Goethe, the experimental prose poems of Turgenev and Tagore that

must have influenced Chu Yohan’s own “Pulnori”. The Ch’angjo authors encountered all of

these different styles simultaneously during their studies in Japan, thereby acquiring a wide array

of new techniques to work with. Also interesting are the writers themselves. Translated texts

were not chosen to display the whole range of foreign literature, but rather to show what they

hoped Korean literature could become.

With this in mind, it is especially interesting to note the inclusion in issues seven and eight

of translations of selections from Rabindranath Tagore’s Nobel Prize winning “Gitanjali”.

Tagore was a Bengali poet who was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature

for this volume of poetry. Tagore, a citizen of a colonized Bengal, had a complicated relationship

with the nationalist movements there, and became well-known for his anti-imperialist,

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universalist and internationalist ideals. He also had a complicated relationship with East Asia,

often due to his position as an outsider forming judgements on events without full understanding

of the context (Hay 1957, 116). Many Korean students encountered Tagore’s writings in

Japanese translation during their studies in Japan and his ideas appealed to them. In 1916, Tagore

even visited Japan to lecture and met with Korean students, allegedly inspiring him to later write

certain poems including “Lamp of the East” (1929) about Korea and its freedom fighters. In light

of the message of Tagore’s 1916 visit, it is important to examine the sources of the objects of

translation in Ch’angjo. In Tagore’s 1916 speech, aimed at the people of Japan—an empire of

which the Korean peninsula was currently a part—he asserted the following:

“The political civilization which has sprung up from the soil of Europe and is

overrunning the whole world, like some prolific weed, is based on

exclusiveness. It is always watchful to keep the aliens at bay or to exterminate

them. It is carnivorous and cannibalistic in its tendencies, it feeds upon the

resources of other peoples and tries to swallow their whole future…

“Japan has imported her food from the West, but not her vital nature. Japan

cannot altogether lose and merge herself in the scientific paraphernalia she has

acquired from the West and be turned into a mere borrowed machine. She has

her own soul, which must assert itself over all her requirements.”

(Tagore, in Hay 1957, 77)

From Tagore’s “The Message of India to Japan”, we can see that he was opposed to blanket

Westernization and spoke vehemently to Japan against blind adoption of various technologies

and cultural norms from Western imperial nations. This did not go over well with a lot of

Japanese critics, especially as it came from a citizen of a “lost country” (Hay 1957, 116), as India

was at the time a part of the British Empire, but it must have struck a chord with many of the

Korean students who heard his speech in Tokyo. While many of the poetry translations in

Ch’angjo come from Europe, most of them are not from English, but rather French, and German.

The inclusion of translations of modern Japanese poetry, the poems of Tagore and Turgenev, as

well as discussions on Tolstoy and Dostoevsky highlight a deliberate and careful selection of

foreign writers, curated to break from a unified view of the “West” and its literature and culture.

In their attempts to include translations of literature from multiple languages and locations—

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though probably mostly re-translations of Japanese versions—they supported Tagore’s

universalist appeals and attempted to select the literature which would most benefit Ch’angjo’s

message rather than blindly reprinting every popular piece of Western European literature.

These translations from poets across Europe and Asia and critiques and analyses of

literature outside of the canon of Korean literature also showed a desire to elevate Ch’angjo from

being simply a local publication to being part of the global little magazine movement. By

consciously printing their own works alongside those of writers from Tokyo to Paris, they placed

themselves and the blossoming foundations of modern Korean literature on equal footing with

works from around the world. Bulson also points out that for many little magazines, the seeming

cosmopolitanism within the pages functioned “to mask the relative isolation of their own

location” (2017, 43-44). In the same line of thinking, Bulson points out that despite the little

magazine movement being a global movement, with little magazines popping up on all inhabited

continents, the magazines are “always defined within and against national borders of countries

such as France, Poland, and Spain” (46). Therefore, while including both the consistent material

elements linking the little magazine network and the translations of and commentaries on pieces

of literature from countries spanning Western Europe and Asia places Ch’angjo into this

cosmopolitan sphere of the little magazine, it is still a publication inextricably linked to Korean

literature. Furthermore, it was not designed to be for a global audience but rather to translate and

ground global forms within a new conception of modern Korean literature.

4.3. Gender Archetypes

The heightened literary development in this period also stands out starkly in the authors’

treatment of female characters. Ch’angjo was written predominately by men. Only one female

writer, Kim Myǒng-sun, contributed to its pages and even then, only in a limited capacity

through a few pieces of poetry in the seventh and eighth issues (Lee 2015). Despite the heavily

male-weighted gender distribution of the list of contributors, there is wide variation in the

treatment of gender, particularly in the publication’s short stories. Yang (2017, 2018) has already

done extensive work on the topic of gender characterizations in Korean literature in this time

period, so in this section we will look specifically at Kang Elizabeth, the protagonist of Kim

Tongin’s “Sorrow of the Weak” and how her character and its translated form exemplifies this

turning point in modern Korean literature.

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In the modernist Japanese literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries there arose the

character archetype that Indra Levy refers to as the “Westernesque Femme Fatale”. This

archetype was a hybridized character that was “neither ethnically or culturally ‘Western’ per se,

yet distinguished by physical appearances, personal mannerisms, lifestyles, behaviours, and ways

of thinking that were perceived with the Japanese context as particularly evocative of the West”

(Levy 2006, 5). Japanese literature in the Meiji period begins introducing these Westernesque

“Siren” female characters. They are characterized by their appearance, often with emphasis on

their choice of hairstyle and clothing; by their mannerisms, which flout traditional Confucian

conceptions of women; by their lifestyles, often including living separate from their families and

perhaps working or pursuing an education; and by their ways of thinking, which, like their

mannerisms, betray a sense of modernity in contrast to established forms of Japanese femininity;

among other characteristics. Levy asserts that both the vernacularization of literature, as well as

these new character archetypes that included the “Westernesque Femme Fatale” were “the

privileged objects of an exoticism that underwrote the creation of Japanese literary modernity

itself” (2006, 2). In Korean literature, this exoticism was often retranslated translation. Korean

writers, as they emulated the Japanese exoticism of the West, were in a way exoticizing Japan, so

theirs was not a direct Western exoticism, but rather one tempered by Japan’s perceptions and

selections of desirable aspects of the West. In regards to vernacularization, as discussed in

Chapter 3, this exoticism manifested itself in a phonocentrism that led for some to call for

widespread adoption of the Roman alphabet, and ultimately, in Korea, led to the adoption of

han’gǔl in literature, scholarly writing, and eventually every genre. As for the character

archetypes that emulated the West to a culturally swallowable extent, these made their way into

Korean literature as well. It doesn’t seem coincidental that these archetypes of the positive

aspects of cultural desire are most often inscribed on objects of sexual desire, the female

characters.

To varying extents, these Westernesque femme fatales can be seen in Yi Kwang-su’s

Mujǒng (1917) in the characters of Kim Byǒng-uk, the student on vacation from studying abroad

in Japan, Pak Yǒng-ch’ae, a young woman who as a youth was forced to become a kisaeng in an

attempt to save her imprisoned and consequently deceased father who was the male protagonist’s

Confucian school mentor, and Kim Sǒn-hyǒng, the well-educated daughter of a Christian family

who becomes engaged to the male protagonist. All of these characters display various

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characteristics of the Westernesque femme fatale in their discovery of their own subjectivity,

their desire for knowledge, and their awareness of a morality outside of the traditional Confucian

system. Yi even provides the reader with non-Westernesque women, such as Kim Byǒng-uk’s

sister-in-law, with whom these three female characters can be contrasted, throwing their

archetypical Westernesque features into greater relief. Two years later, these same archetypes

also appear in Ch’angjo, most apparently in Kim Tongin’s “Sorrow of the Weak” through the

main character Kang Elizabeth.

Kang Elizabeth is a schoolgirl who comes from the countryside. She is studying in a formal

school and working as a live-in tutor (kajǒng kyosa) in Seoul, away from her family. Her very

name automatically prepares the reader for the archetypical Western traits Elizabeth will

embody. The first sentence alone gives us enough information to set Elizabeth apart from

traditional Confucian archetypes of women. “Elizabeth Kang, a live-in tutor, finished her

teaching and returned to her room.” In this sentence we learn that her name is Elizabeth, a

Western name, she is educated enough to teach, she works, and she has her own room, all things

that speak more to the individualist Romantic archetype than to the typical female characters of

pre-modern Korean literature. Furthering the subjectivity of Elizabeth’s character, throughout the

novella, we are given access to her thoughts as she goes down a path of self-discovery. She, as

an individual subject, rises to the forefront against the landscape of Seoul and its inhabitants, her

thoughts placed on display for all to read. Kim Tongin enables the reader to see into the thought

processes of Elizabeth as the story progresses so that the reader is able to experience the events

‘authentically’ as she does. Because of this thought narration, as readers, we realize that

Elizabeth is pregnant the same time she does. There are various moments in the story where

Elizabeth is faced with a decision, and as Kim Tongin paints her indecision and vacillation, the

reader is also sent on a confusing journey of indecision, being led to conclusions by her thought

processes in the same way the character is. This process of decision making also sets Elizabeth

apart as an individual as it shows that while she is acted upon by events, the decisions on how to

proceed are made by her. She is encouraged not to bring her former employer to court after she is

impregnated by him during a relationship that forms through rape, yet she chooses on her own,

against the advice of relatives to pursue legal recourse. She is the archetypical Western-esque

femme fatale not only through her background and the various traits given to her by the author,

Kim Tongin, but also through her control over her own destiny, though she doesn’t truly realize

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this point herself until the end of the story. After a miscarriage—the narration of which truly

outlines the lack of reliable knowledge on childbirth among the coterie of male authors—

Elizabeth, through contemplations over the body of the lifeless fetus, comes to know her own

weaknesses and declares that it is only though knowing our weaknesses that we can be strong.

Ultimately her moment of enlightenment takes a sentimental, romantic turn as she declares that

she will become strong through true love, for “Love is the womb that gives birth to strength.”

With Elizabeth’s interiority and subjectivity, her character must be looked at through the

lens of translation. At the time of her inception through Kim Tongin’s imagination and pen, she

would not have been considered an archetype of the ideal Korean woman. She is deeply flawed

and makes countless errors as she works on discovering her own subjectivity; she is a sexual

being, choosing to continue the relationship with her employer after the initial forced encounter;

she is well-educated and able to support herself; and she is seemingly unconnected to any

immediate family members, only a distant relative in the countryside who is related by marriage

rather than blood (och’onmo, 五寸母), to whom she returns when she is released from her

employment. She doesn’t display any filial piety of a typical Chosǒn heroine, and she even seeks

out an abortion through the administration of Western medicine—though in the end, the

medicine turns not to be an abortifacient. Yet, Elizabeth is without a doubt the heroine of the

story. The reader is intended to read her struggle and sympathize with her, then be gratified by

the personal growth she has made by the end of the novel—though they are left to imagine any

real-world applications of her epiphany. These characteristics are not native to Korean literature

and can instead be traced to Western Romantic literature through the filter of Japan. In this form

of exoticism, difference is magnified “through the overt attempt to erase it, exoticism often

erases difference in the professed attempt to manifest it, by reducing it to the purely relative

statues of the commensurable” (Levy 2006). These exotic elements of European Romanticism

are emphasized in “Sorrow of the Weak” as they are set as commensurable to the previously

established Korean elements they replace. Thus, the Confucian woman is set as the equivalent of

the Westeresque femme fatale, and in attempting to erase the Confucian woman, Elizabeth’s

Western elements are thrown into stark relief in contrast with the absent Confucian elements.

This again supports Peter Osborne’s “cultural affirmation of a particular temporal logic of

negation” that operates to create the modern by negating the past through the introduction of

something that, in a certain context, is made new through this contrast, despite the fact that many

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of these innovations had been used in the European literary sphere for over a century. All of this

serves to show that Elizabeth is therefore a translated character, but one who is positioned within

a Korean text and imbued with only enough Western elements to negate an “uncivilized”

Confucian past, all while being painted over a heavily Korean landscape in such a way as to

naturalize this Westernesque archetype into the Korean landscape.

Levy echoes Karatani in asserting that this naturalization of external forms is what drives

translation. “Berman’s ‘translating drive’ is not that which motivates a translator to transport the

ostensible content of a foreign text—as an eminently unknowable object—to the familiar terms

of her own language, but the drive to transform her native language by means of what she sees as

ontologically superior linguistic alterity. In fact, as Kojin Karatani has argued, the drive lies at

the very heart of all attempts to vernacularize writing” (Levy 2006). This drive is present in all

the written experimentations of Ch’angjo and is particularly present in its fiction and poetry. The

coterie members, assessing certain elements of the international literature they had encountered

in Japan as superior to Korean literature in its present state, sought to transform their native

literature and language based on what they had seen. They didn’t want to turn Korean literature

into an imitation of international literature, but rather wanted to imbue their national literature

with international qualities to lift it into a superior realm. This tendency can be seen in all the

elements discussed in previous chapters and is apparent in Elizabeth’s character as well. The

characteristics of interiority, subjectivity, and the search for enlightenment are all parts of

Elizabeth. She is a modern, self-aware girl, and a symbol of Kim Tongin’s exoticism and his

transformative hopes for Korean literature.

The character of Elizabeth was formed in a transitional phase between female archetypes in

in early modern Korean literature. Yoon Sun Yang (2017), in her book From Domestic Women

to Sensitive Young Men, describes two female archetypes commonly found in the colonial era:

the femme fatale character of the early period and the “literary figure of the modern girl” in

literature of the 1920s and 1930s. She asserts that while both archetypes are ‘individualist’, and

they are both driven by Romanticist notions of passion, with wide variability in personal natures,

“the unruly modern girls of the fictional narratives of the 1920s and 1930s tend to highlight the

moral superiority of male elite figures”, while the femme fatale characters and their interactions

with yangban elites become symbols of fin de siècle Korea (Yang 2017, 121-122). In “Sorrow of

the Weak”, the namjak does not escape from the narrative with the moral high ground. In the

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internal dialogue of the rape scene he repeatedly misunderstands her rejections and forces

himself upon her. He barely addresses the fact that she is pregnant and makes no attempts to stop

his wife from firing Elizabeth when she is too ill to continue working. When Elizabeth takes him

to court, he uses his money to win the case, citing that Elizabeth has no proof of their affair or

that he is the father of the unborn child, further pushing Elizabeth into despair. It is Elizabeth,

with her inner battle and ultimate survival and triumph that seizes the moral superiority from the

male character who is the embodiment of many of the negative aspects of modernity. Elizabeth is

indeed the Westernesque femme fatale, and at the same time, she is what Yi Hyeryǒng puts

forward as an emblem of fin de siècle Korea (in Yang 2017), that moment in between Chinese

and Japanese cultural oppression, when Korea declared its own sovereignty, and in the midst of

Japanese imperialism, she is a symbol that the Korea of the fin de siècle can overcome the

current moment of cultural rape. Thus, while we can see influences of foreign forms and

exoticism in the character of Elizabeth, at her core, she is a response to a moment in Korean

history, a moment when the current state of subjugation is not an inevitability that must be

endured, but something that is possible to overcome.

With Yang’s analysis in mind, “Sorrow of the Weak” really was a transitional piece for

Kim Tongin, while it is not strictly a “domestic novel” (kajǒng sosǒl), particularly as those were

quite out of vogue by the time the first issue of Ch’angjo was published, the character of

Elizabeth is very similar to the archetype of the domestic woman. Though she has no family or

strict domestic sphere that she needs to stick to, her vocation is to take care of and educate a

child. She is then forced to return to the countryside and her distant relative when she is

weakened by her own pregnancy. Apart from a trips to a hospital and a courtroom, the majority

of the plot takes place within domestic compounds, and as Nancy Armstrong asserts is typical,

her mind is often concerned with “matters of courtship and marriage” (1987, 5) as she vacillates

between her feelings for the namjak and a mysterious Mr. Yi Hwan whom she claims to love, but

never physically encounters during the narrative. The domestic novel’s treatment of new

technology and infrastructure is also echoed in “Sorrow of the Weak”, as is the symbolic

equivalency of home and nation. Yang (2017) asserts that “each domestic novel imaginatively

redraws its own version of the world in which the home displaces the space of the nation, and

where individual character’s destiny foreshadows that of her family as well as that of her nation”

(30). As discussed earlier in this chapter, Elizabeth’s character arc is highly representative of

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Kim Tongin’s view of Korea’s national trajectory. Yet, at the same time as she takes on these

elements of the domestic, Elizabeth also shows the beginnings of characterizations that are

further developed in later works by Kim, whose main characters eventually embody the

archetype of the sensitive young man, as can be seen in ‘K’ from “Oh the frail-hearted!”.

According to Yoon, sensitive young men, “lose their unmediated ties with the world outside by

receding into their inner space” (42). This is what Elizabeth does following her many setbacks,

first the betrayal by her friend, then the rape by her employer, next the pregnancy, followed by

being kicked out of her employer’s home, then losing her court case, the list goes on. In each of

these moments, she retreats into her own mind. In the trial, she is unable to speak up for herself

because she has already retreated into her thoughts and cannot force them into the exterior world.

In this analysis, Elizabeth is simultaneously a domestic woman and the beginnings of a sensitive

young man, yet, as shown earlier, she is also a Westernesque femme fatale character on the cusp

of becoming a “modern girl.” Therefore, Elizabeth’s multifaceted characterization in “Sorrow of

the Weak” is demonstrative of Yang’s claim that the move from domestic woman to sensitive

young man was a transitional one, and it typifies the push towards literary innovation and

progress in particular by Kim Tongin and by extension the whole Ch’angjo coterie.

The ways in which Ch’angjo’s literary works were written, the pieces selected, and the

topics addressed demonstrate the authors’ desire to transform Korean literature from within.

Romantic and Modern themes are always used within Korea-specific language and contexts, in

conjunction with those parts of culture and custom that the authors deem to be symbolic of Korea

as a nation. Having encountered Western forms of Romanticism, modernity, and gender

archetypes during their studies in Japan, they translated what they deemed to be the superior

portions of these newly encountered forms into their indigenous literature. Therefore, even at the

deepest level of analysis, the effect of the writers’ efforts was the same as on the surface of this

little magazine, to take global forms and by writing them into the local, create a new Korean

literature that could stand unashamedly alongside global literature in the little magazine network

while simultaneously being undeniably Korean.

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Conclusion

Ch’angjo offers a view into the material, linguistic, and contextual elements of writing as

the foundations of modern Korean literature were being laid. Published in its pages are examples

of the ideas and stylistic innovations that formed the base of a new national literature that

consciously placed works of Korean authors on the same level as works from global authors

spanning from London to Tokyo. Ch’angjo joined the ranks of little magazines from around the

world in its mission to innovate and experiment with new forms free from the censure of the

larger publishing houses and, in the case of 1920s Korea, somewhat, though not wholly, distant

from the censure of the Japanese colonial government.

Ch’angjo’s form, content, and experimentations with vernacularization and written style

place it firmly in the canon of little magazines and as part of the global movement to create new

art and literature without constraint. As part of the little magazine movement and the move

towards a phonocentric mode of writing, the authors of Ch’angjo displayed their collective goal

to incorporate and indigenize elements of Western norms into modern Korean literature. The

emphasis on nature, death, and the interior self sets many of Ch’angjo’s pieces apart as

Romantic, while the localization and melding of external forms of medicine, education, and

religion into the existent Korean landscape show a shift towards the modern as characters and

objects contrast with a present that is being over-written as past. The shifts in gendered character

archetypes lend to this modernization as well, with female characters acting as conduits for the

introduction of positive exotic characteristics and features, while at the same time the

sensitivities and interiority that eventually become associated with masculine figures highlight

the authors’ perceived role of masculine sensitivity in the creation of art.

The winding paths of history intersected at this moment in the late 1910s and early 1920s,

creating conduits of ideology and creativity which enabled Ch’angjo and publications like it to

appear. Korean authors, harnessing these resources and this temporality, were able to express

themselves in ways that were unique to them. As written language became a reflection of the

spoken word—though never a true equivalent—the mentality of Korean writers changed, as

consequently did their artistic expression. Before, particularly in Korea, writing and speaking

had been almost wholly separate spheres—written language was predominately Classical

Chinese, and spoken was Korean—and as they collided it opened up a world of internal

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reflection, dialogue, and variation in points of view that the writers of Ch’angjo took advantage

of as they used this experimental period in literary history to set the foundations not only for

modern Korean literature, but for the contemporary written Korean language as well.

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