Dafna Zur's Figuring Korean Futures: Children's Literature in Modern Korea introduces us to the kaleidoscopic world of Korean children's literature from 1908 to 1950. As the first book-length English-language study of Korean children's literature, it covers a truly impressive range of primary and secondary materials. Zur sets forth the scope of her research as “poetry, prose, illustrations, and miscellaneous textual forms published in children's magazines or newspaper columns aimed at young readers” (p. 6), but her discussion at times spills over to even more diverse texts, such as a collection of translated folktales (p. 83) and a radio script (p. 129). Her main argument is that colonial-era Korean writers created an idealized closeness of children to nature through the notion of tongsim, which she translates as “the child-heart.”
Organized chronologically, the six main chapters examine an extensive array of topics related to children's literature published over the first half of the twentieth century: the image of youth (undistinguished from children) as a means to promote the ideology of “enlightenment and civilization” in early colonial Korea (chapter 1); the emergence of child-friendly illustrations and a written language appropriate for young readers in the 1920s (chapters 2 and 3); the portrayal of children as proletarians in leftist children's magazines (chapter 4); the tension between the attempt to raise future imperial soldiers and the struggle to find hope in children through laughter and lightheartedness in wartime (1937–45) children's magazines (chapter 5); and the postcolonial reclamation of national language and history in children's magazines and newspapers during the postliberation period (1945–50) (chapter 6). In the epilogue, Zur suggests that after the Korean War (1950–53), “the bond between child and nature” was no longer tenable, and children came to be viewed instead as future agents of science and the “ultimate masters” (p. 192) of nature.
Zur identifies “the most striking feature” of the discourse on tongsim (tongxin in Chinese or dōshin in Japanese) as “the perception of the child's existence on the threshold of culture: the child was closer to the flora and fauna than to acculturated adults” (p. 6). She observes that “[i]n Korea, philosophies of the human mind and theories of child development, both local and global, shaped the belief in the existence of … the tongsim” (p. 5). While appreciating the utility of this term in analyzing modern childhood and its surrounding culture, I am curious whether she regards tongsim as historically unique to colonial Korean children's literature, a modern construct globally emergent over the last few centuries, or an idea dating back to ancient China. Does tongsim suppose the Cartesian separation between mind and body? Or could it be a twentieth-century reappropriation of the ancient or early modern sense of the word? If the tie between nature and child was broken after the Korean War, can we detect similar phenomena outside North and South Korea? Instead of showing how she conceptualizes the age-old term tongsim for her inquiry, Zur simply states—after citing a long list of thinkers like Mencius, Liang Qichao, John Locke, Sigmund Freud, Carolyn Steedman, Jacqueline Rose, and Karatani Kojin as representative theorists of the child-heart in East and West—that, “I, too, argue that Korean children's literature … was developed alongside the concept of the child-heart” (p. 6). She then stresses the importance of this notion in studying colonial-era Korean children's literature: “It is the tongsim that required a ‘translation’ of the world, but that also embraced contradictory impulses of nature and culture, those very same elements under threat by the colonial regime” (pp. 6–7). Readers likely would have appreciated a more rigorous definition of the original term. It also would have been helpful if Zur had shared the process via which she decided to translate tongsim as “the child-heart” rather than possible alternatives such as “the childlike mind” or “the child-mind.”
Irrespective of these issues, I would like to emphasize that Figuring Korean Futures opens a lot of doors to future research. Anyone who embarks on the challenging task of writing about Korean children's literature will have to study Zur's book closely. It might also inspire some East Asianists to investigate the transnational evolution of the notion of tongsim/tongxin/dōshin. As a remarkably rich study of modern Korean children's literature, this book will be most welcomed by students and teachers of East Asian culture, literature, and history, as well as by scholars of children's literature around the world. Written in a jargon-free manner, it is suitable for undergraduate as well as graduate courses.
