Abstract
This essay explores the affects observable in colonial Korea and China of the late 1910s. Two kinds of affects can be taken from the media responses to the March First Movement and the May Fourth Movement, shame and sympathy respectively. The Chinese became shameful in the face of the March First and the colonial Koreans were sympathized with the Chinese in light of their similar historical experience.BR The two forms of affects are found in the fictional narratives of Yi Kwangsu and Lu Xun. Yi tried to call forth the changes to colonial Korea by illustrating “philanthropic sympathy” in Heartless in which the sympathy goes beyond its conventional notion. The “traveller’s” portrayal, however, arrives only at harmony, the collaboration for the benefits of social maintenance. On the other hand, the madman in Lu Xun’s “A Madman’s Diary” realizes shame, which is related to the fear of unreliable self-portrayal rather than the guilty consciousness by breaching norms. This shame enables a person to go beyond the “threshold” and to create new vision by being accompanied with a radical self-dichotomy such as a desire for matricide. Yi’s sympathy and Lu Xun’s shame differ in the faithful practice of colonial modernization and the radical self-destruction.
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