Interpretive Praxis Under Pax Americana: Paik Nak-chung’s Reading of D.H. Lawrence in 1980s’ South Korea

Abstract

Abstract

Abstract This article examines Paik Nak-chung’s (Paek Nakch’ŏng’s) 1982 translation and reading of D.H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature (1923) as a case of interpretive praxis under Cold War authoritarianism in South Korea. Situated between the aftershocks of the Kwangju Uprising and the intensification of anti-American student activism, Paik’s essay “The American Dream and the Burden of American Literature” appears, at first glance, anomalous: Why would a leading critic of literary engagement turn to Lawrence at a moment when dissident reading communities centered on Marx, Fanon, and other banned revolutionary texts? I argue that Paik’s sustained engagement with Lawrence is best understood as a metacritical strategy that converts reading and translation into a political intervention. Working through Lawrence’s symptomatic critique of “American democracy” and the ideological work of the American dream, Paik exposes US imperial duplicity while simultaneously resisting the nativist essentialism that could accompany virulent anti-Americanism in 1980s Korea. Lawrence’s insistence on stripping “democratic and idealistic clothes” from American utterance becomes, in Paik’s hands, a method for historicizing—one that links the contradictions of American nation-building to South Korea’s compressed modernization and US-backed authoritarianism. Tracing how Paik reframes Lawrence’s critique of the “whole soul” of America, I show how he articulates a decolonizing stance that resists simple binaries of foreign imperialist versus authentic minjung. Finally, situating Paik’s Lawrence within a longer genealogy of criticism shaped by Matthew Arnold and F. R. Leavis, I argue that Paik’s “double project of modernity” (ijung kwajeron) marks a commitment to hold aesthetic autonomy and political praxis in productive tension with each other.