Authors as Creators of Art: The Collaborative Shaping of Literary Writers in Ch’angjo

Abstract

In the early 1920s, when aspiring writers still strived to conceptualize modern literature in Korea, the ideas and images of a literary author were not firmly established. Facing the recalcitrant prejudice against art as vulgar entertainment, those writers tried to settle into the idea of modern literature as “divine” art by adapting Romanticism to Korea. Coterie magazines, such as Ch’angjo (Creation, 1919-21), played an important role in circulating modern aesthetics. Yet they also provided a platform for those writers with aspirations to collaboratively perceive what kinds of writers they were. By examining discourses on art, essays about the writers themselves, and prose fiction on artists in Ch’angjo, I argue that the figure of the writer as a creator of art was socially made in 1920s Korea through coterie magazines, which connected the members’ shared practice of portraying artists to their collective projects of self-making.