Abstract

‘Literary girls’ were the nuclear representation of cultural politics after the liberation. In the 1950’s, ‘literary girls’ were the sign of literary readers of the ‘hakwon generation’ taking liberalism as their basis of culture while in the 1960’s, ‘literary girls’ were the sign of negation and imitation degraded as the sign of post-historical hostility contrasting semantically against ‘youths’ represented as the subjects of history. After the liberation, ‘literary girls/boys’ were literary readers of the Hangul generation that had acquired the principles of democracy. Although in the 1960’s, the ground for ‘what to be literature’ was formed, a variety of democratic dynamisms or trends they held beforehand were excluded or underestimated in the public field of discussion during the 1960’s. It is the result of the fact that in the 1960’s, the meaning of ‘youths’ as the subjects of history was set excessively in the nationalistic background. On account of this, within the contrast between ‘local/foreign’, ‘body/mind’, or ‘labor/playfulness’, the semantic ground for youths, literary girls ‘reading the book of French poems’ were discussed as the sign of a deep-rooted evil hindering national development, and furthermore, they were underestimated as the ‘imitation of literature’ within the field of literature. After the 1960’s, ‘literary girls’ did not remain in the descriptive definition of ‘girls who like to read literary works’, but the books they chose to read were underestimated as the ‘imitation of literature’, too, and even the dynamic cultural flow after the war came to be excluded as well. Therefore, various trends or pursuits achieved first by the literary boys and girls in the 1950’s got to be segmented, so it led to the conservatism and rigorism of ‘muncheong’ in the 1960’s.