A present crisis, and a return to Hangok-ri

The notes open Shim Hun’s Sangnoksu from a present they describe as unprecedented: the arrival of a transformative Fourth Industrial era, and a sudden coronavirus pandemic. Phenomena hard to answer clearly, they write, will come more often and in more shapes, and the people who must meet them cannot be limited to specialists. Modern literature, and modern novels that embody our lives, can be a driving force for the flexibility such a time needs, because a novel can narrate a concrete discourse, reflect its moment, and meet the reader through living characters and the interest of a story.

Korean modern literature, they add, has crossed the stepping-stones of a turbulent history; they invite a reading of the times through novels they gather under the phrase “a hundred years of modern Korean literature.” That phrase stays in the window in which they wrote it. At the centre of Sangnoksu they place Park Dong-hyeok, a future-opening figure of firm will, who meets hardship and works toward a better tomorrow.

A farmers’ association, a night school, a communal field

Park Dong-hyeok, they write, believed the Korean nation’s path of self-reliance lay in the recovery of the rural economy, and so went back to his home village, Hangok-ri, and organized a farmers’ association and a night school. He was a strongly practical young man of firm will. In Hangok-ri the association worked a communal field.

He criticized Christianity as a fallen religion that had submitted to capitalism and, at the opening ceremony of a promotion association, exposed the plunder and high-handedness of the landlord class — enough, in their wording, to call him a class thinker. In other words, they write, the aim is to contend with the landlord stratum, to be freed from the economic extraction and exploitation of a colonial rural policy, and thereby to realize a national ideal.

Intellectuals among farmers, not over them

What they emphasize is this: one should not drift away from farmers’ lives, but go out to the countryside, live just as farmers live, come to know their actual conditions, and work as far as possible at their daily problems. An intellectual is not a person who stands over farmers, but should become an intellectual among farmers — a “farmer-ization” of the intelligentsia, in their wording. People who have tried a rural duty movement can, they write, then turn into workers of a farmers’ movement. Knowledge, in the period of Japanese occupation, should set aside the desires of a privileged stratum and return to the countryside, to live as one with farmers.

The title of the notes also speaks of enlightenment put into practice, and of a comradely love; The reading stays with the figures and acts they actually name, and does not add characters they do not. The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. The notes, a student reading of Shim Hun’s Sangnoksu, with Park Dong-hyeok’s return to Hangok-ri, a farmers’ association and night school, a communal field, and a phrase about a hundred years of modern Korean literature left as the notes wrote it.

Last updated: 15 November 2026