(비)동시성의 심상지리와 현실의 문학 ― 최일수와 1950년대 한국문학의 비평적 좌표

“Literature of Reality” is the main theme of literary critic Choi Il-Soo in the 1950s. Here, reality has a complex semantic structure, as it refers to a moment of simultaneity in which the History of Korean Literature joins the History of the World Literature, which has been biased in favor of Western Europe since the dawn of Modernity. The two World Wars and the Korean War created a historical juncture, placing the world of the mid-20th century at the “coordinates of zero.” Choi Il-Soo thought that the moment when the world and Korea were simultaneously at the zero point was a curiosity in which Korean literature could develop equally with World Literature, because at the moment of world history when the old Modernity ended and the new Modernity began, Korean literature would stand out as a member of the History of World Literature. Therefore, the task of literary criticism was to encourage and trigger Korean literature to have an active and proactive content that would be appropriate to the new era. The “Literature of Reality” corresponds to the national form of Worldness developed through the mutual relationship between national literature and world literature. However, the simultaneity of the world history that was the premise of Choi Il-Soo’s criticism was more of an illusion that overlooked the reality of the time when political ideologies were strongly at play, which explains the historical problem that the literary criticism of the 1950s did not find its place. The purpose of this paper is to understand the coordinates of Korean literary criticism in the 50s by reconstructing this context.