earticle

영어

The Sindan gong'an 神斷公案, a kind of crime fiction consisting of 190 chapters, routinely appeared on the Hwangsŏng sinmun 皇城新聞, one of the earliest Korean newspapers, from the 19th of May to the end of the year of 1906. The appearance of the Sindan gong'an on such modern newspapers seems unlikely in that these serialized crime stories heavily relied on the traditional genre of Chinese crime fiction called gong'an 公案. Three of the seven crime stories in the Sindan gong'an are based on the Longtu gong'an 龍圖公案 whose focus lies in the famous Confucian Judge Bao and his relentless punishment of evil. The first commercial edition of this story collection appeared no later than the early seventeenth century, and a few different editions of the Judge Bao story collection were transmitted to postwar Korean society between the late sixteenth and the early seventeenth century. How was the appearance of such “old” crime stories on the “modern” newspapers, in which Confucian feudalism and anachronistic social justice were represented, possible? The existence of the Sindan gong'an itself is problematic, even embarrassing, to the students of modern literary history who would consider the Western detective novel as the truly modern form of crime fiction. However, the Sindan gong'an betrays the expectations of those literary historians who would have believed in the authoritative presence of a singular Modernity. Instead, it suggests the possibility of the discourse on “repressed mhe possibi,” which point to a genealogy of Chinese and Korean fiction since the nineteenth century. As nce of prg clearly pointed out, I do not see literary modernization, especially in modern East Asia, as a singular, inevitable process. The Sindan gong'an can be considered as one remarkable literary example among many, through which will make us see numerous possibilities of modernities.