When the Future Disappears: The Modernist Imagination in Late Colonial Korea

A lucid study of Korean literary history during the colonial period seems almost impossible, especially during the politically oppressive “dark period” (amhŭkki), from the late 1930s to the early 1940s. As Janet Poole outlines in her book’s introduction, the problem of “triple censorship”—by the Japanese colonial authority, and the ideologically divided two Koreas after liberation—will always cast a shadow in the reading of colonial Korean writers’ works. Poole’s book sheds a ray of light by focusing on the theme of a disappearing future in late colonial modernist works. The fading future of Korea and Koreanness is articulated in several experiments until, ultimately, the work is literally not in Korean, but in Japanese. However, Poole reminds the reader to distinguish what is literary and literal. What must be examined is the writer’s language within the national language—whether it is Korean or Japanese. What matters is not to search word-for-word for what is missing, but how the writers were able to pass on their meanings in the rhetorical. Poole sets out to do exactly that, by choosing to write on the “productivity of [the] silence” rather than “impose substitutes or presume