earticle

영어

On the Korean peninsula where freedom of thought is still not guaranteed rights, the two Koreas, exist in a confrontational relationship of hatred and pity in which each emphasizes the other’s faults. Internalized division consciousness suppressed the most fundamental right of the people to resist non-democratic dictatorial power. But even though the circumstances of the division re -organized all aspects of daily life and culture in the South and North, there was a long period of stagnation in academic circles before the division was addressed as a research topic. The goal of this paper is to outline the trajectories of heterogeneous discourses of national culture commonly shared by Koreans in the 1970s, and read them within the context of the national division. The primary objects of analysis are state-led ‘national culture’, the ‘national culture’ built by intellectual groups, and a third, still different ‘national culture’ embodied in the journal Bburi gipeun namu(Deep-rooted tree). It ultimately asks if an ‘national culture’ discourse was possible that guaranteed criticality and communication, without being co-opted by official logics of nationalism, or becoming absorbed in ideal imperatives.