Abstract

This article aimed to looked back at the 1960s, which were assessed to be ‘the age of essays’, to survey denotations of essays, amplified by the discourse antagonism surrounding ‘essays’ and the writings of philosophers. Kim Hyeong Suk, Ahn Byeong Uk, and Kim Te Gil were philosophy professors of Yonsei University, Soongshil University, and Seoul National University and writers of numerous essay collections of the 1960s. However, there have been very few studies conducted on them. This is because of old prejudices within literary history that primarily undervalue essays and practices that try to limit them as ‘Literariness’. Essays of the 1960s became the flavor of the times based on democratic demands that attempted to objectify individual experiences and grounds that passed through the war and the April 19 Revolution. The language of philosophers was expropriated through the various senses of first person writing to readers of the times, which lacked civil culture and national morality. Deficits in public spheres of the 1950s and 1960s were filled by Kim Hyeong Suk’s narrations of comfort and conquest based on historic experiences, Ahn Byeong Uk’s logic of self-discipline and knowledge based on democracy, and Kim Te Gil’s humor and introspection that objectified the lives of the petit bourgeois. However, as the essays of philosophers failed to connect with the public discourse of the age, they were unable to go as far as sparking or serving as a medium for civil culture in the 1970s. Regardless, as essays rose historically in the 1960s, thought was given to the characteristics of the ‘essay’ genre and in connection, to the merits and demerits of cultural history that possesses the language of philosophers.