In the process of sifting through content likely to appear on the secondary-school teacher certification exam, I thought it would be nice to post it on the blog, so I'm putting it up. Before writing in earnest, I'll mention last year's questions a bit. The literature fill-in-the-blank questions that appeared on the 2017 certification exam — 'inner confessional style' and the '-ira' style — were among the questions within my predicted range, because Yeom Sang-seop's 'inner confessional style' was a quite meaningful aspect of novels in the 1920s. The things you can recall when you think of Yeom Sang-seop can be organized as roughly personality and art, inner confession, and the reconstruction of social reality, so one of those came up. The organization of Hyun Jin-geon is done as an extension of this kind of organization. It'll be a sort of 'keyword'-centered organization that I've organized and thought through, but since it helps when understanding Hyun Jin-geon himself too, I'm putting it up.
1. Author Background Knowledge
1) Wife: Hyun Jin-geon married early. Most intellectuals of the 1920s didn't want to marry early, but in the end they married early. This mostly amounts to an unavoidable choice imposed by the family. It was the same for Hyun Jin-geon. For him, early marriage is revealed in various literary works. 'The Poor Wife' (Bincheo), 'A Society That Drives One to Drink,' and 'The Degenerate' are examples. Since marrying early isn't a love marriage, it's a regrettable thing for the early-1920s intellectuals who cried out for the 'modern subject.' Because of that, there were countless cases of meeting other women, but for Hyun Jin-geon those cases can be seen as rather few. Looking at the records about Kim Dong-in, it's said his wife once caught him in the moment of carousing with a gisaeng, but Hyun Jin-geon wasn't like that. Maybe that's why, in Hyun Jin-geon's case, it was hard to find a symbolic incident that could be seen as a motif for 'The Degenerate.' (Of course, such an incident does exist. If you look through some books, it turns up.) The reason I placed 'wife' as a keyword is that Hyun Jin-geon's wife was a woman who possessed the inherent ethics handed down through tradition, so she was far removed from the educated 'New Woman' that early-1920s intellectuals desired. You could surmise that this point may have acted as a cause of dissatisfaction for Hyun Jin-geon. In 'The Poor Wife' and 'A Society That Drives One to Drink,' a 'wife' appears who isn't clever and can't fully understand her husband's words. The main tendency is to understand this figure of the wife as autobiographical.
2) Brother (Jeong-geon): Hyun Jin-geon's family was a family of interpreters, and his brothers too are recorded as people who each displayed their own talents. There was a brother who participated in the independence movement, and a brother who, being fluent in Russian, worked at the Russian embassy. Among them, 'Hyun Jeong-geon' is the brother who participated in the independence movement. Many people may not know this, but Hyun Jin-geon was the chief person responsible for the erasure of the Japanese flag in the photo of athlete Sohn Kee-chung. He was a person who kept his own convictions to the extent of serving prison time over this affair. Given that 'A Society That Drives One to Drink' is also understood as an autobiographical novel, the words in it — 'as a Joseon person, one cannot live in this society with a sound mind' — can be grasped as expressing just how much despair the realistic situation was inflicting on intellectuals. His brother Hyun Jeong-geon died in prison, and later Hyun Jeong-geon's wife, who was also Hyun Jin-geon's sister-in-law, died following him. The novels that appear afterward are historical novels and romance novels, but if you organize the authorial consciousness that appeared up until then, he can be grasped as a person who held a sense of mission and will as an intellectual. And there too was the influence of his brother.
3) The technique school (Gigyo-pa): Among the countless words describing Hyun Jin-geon, the word 'technique' was used by contemporaneous literary figures like Kim Dong-in and Park Jong-hwa. The point of how outstanding Hyun Jin-geon's technique was can be known through the fact that, excluding his debut work 'The Sacrificial Flower,' there's no literarily deficient work. Hyun Jin-geon's irony shows a clear difference from the irony used by Kim Yu-jeong or Chae Man-sik, and the result of that irony concludes in the misery and tragedy of reality. Since there's a record of the author himself having said not to view his works through the Western '-isms,' we call him a 'realist,' but it's necessary to remember that this isn't a word that can represent Hyun Jin-geon. The devices he used, and his adjustment of narrator distance, are technique, not tendency. The grasping of him as a factual realist is because, at the start of the 'modern novel' in many countries, it began with expressing fact, and Hyun Jin-geon is the 'standard-bearer' of expressing that fact.
4) Newspaper reporter: I agonized a lot over whether or not to include 'newspaper reporter,' but I thought knowing about the characteristic of being a newspaper reporter itself wouldn't be bad, so I included it. I previously discovered while reading a book that some researcher had the same thought — I surmise that life as a newspaper reporter may have helped him acquire the 'observer's gaze' that grasps and keeps distance from the ordinary people of the time. It's not exact, but I think this gaze is revealed in 'Hometown,' a representative work in which an intellectual's eye appears, and that in 'A Lucky Day,' the very excellent ability to construct and narrate the events of the novel through description may be related to this.
2. Anticipated Questions
1) Fill-in-the-blank type
Fill-in-the-blank types are hard to predict, but for fill-in-the-blank questions about Hyun Jin-geon, I think the technique-related aspect — 'irony' — has the highest probability of appearing. Satire came up once before, and 'irony' hasn't come up yet. Besides this, I'd say there's roughly the 'intellectual's eye.'
2) Short-answer/essay type
For short-answer/essay types, the recent trend seems to divide into giving a <reference passage> and, instead of having a <reference passage>, having you find and use answers from the given text. Either way, there's a high possibility of asking about the devices of the novel. Taking 'A Lucky Day' as an example, I think they could ask about what 'seolleongtang' (ox-bone soup) and the 'rickshaw' signify, what 'jungmo' (aunt) signifies in 'The Grandmother's Death,' what the 'society' in 'A Society That Drives One to Drink' forces upon the narrator, and so on.
'The Grandmother's Death' is undoubtedly a somewhat unusual work, but it's a work that has appeared on the exam regardless. I remember it as a question asking who the object of satire is in 'The Grandmother's Death.' Excluding 'The Grandmother's Death,' works like 'The Poor Wife,' 'A Society That Drives One to Drink,' and 'Hometown' could appear on the exam. The structure is simple but the content is sufficient to ask about. For 'The Poor Wife,' I think they could ask you to write, using a <reference passage>, what the relationship between the wife and the novelist 'I' signifies. For 'A Society That Drives One to Drink,' a question giving a <reference passage> and having you write about it is possible — regarding the point that it depicted the figure of the intellectual of the time, and in relation to the wife's reaction, which doesn't understand such an intellectual's anguish, frustration, and despair. In 'Hometown,' I think the core is the part that narrates the desolate reality while keeping distance and without immersing in emotion.
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