창작과 비평

The Quarterly Changbi 211, Spring 2026

As part of our 60th anniversary yearlong initiative to serve as a hub for K discourse, we are launching a new series in literary criticism titled “Korean Literature and the Possibilities of K Thought.” The series examines how the diverse achievements of Korean literature have opened new horizons of thought and contributed as outstanding “intellectual resources.”
Opening the series, Kang Kyung-seok’s essay “Clues to a New Civilization” explores the civilizational critique and intellectual significance embedded in the literary accomplishments of Na Hye seok and Yeom Sang seop—two figures who stand at the avant garde of Korean modern literary history. Kang offers a vivid discussion of how, through their experiences of the March 1st Movement, Na and Yeom came to recognize Korea’s distinctiveness, and how their thinking on women’s liberation, overcoming modernity, and civilizational transformation took shape.
Sung Hyunah’s literary criticism, meanwhile, points out—through an examination of the novels of Sung Haena, Quan Chunhua, and Ji Kang suk—that the pursuit of authenticity in the process of literary representation is entangled with questions of identity. While the emphasis on authenticity and identity as concepts for testifying to and representing the lives of minorities is a meaningful endeavor within Korean literature, she cautions against allowing these concepts to harden into fixed frameworks that collapse diverse identities into a single, uniform formula.