By Chung Hye-jean
Staff Reporter

In Korea, the top four bestsellers last year were J.K. Rowling’s "Harry Potter" series, Robert Kiyosaki and Sharon Lechter’s "Rich Dad, Poor Dad," Cho Chang-in’s novel "Kasi Kogi (Thorn Fish)" and Jung Chan-yong’s "Never Study English."

They are a fantasy novel about a young magician; a book offering practical tips on making money; a guidebook in studying English; and a tear-jerking novel. If this attests to what readers today are interested in, it is clear that pure literary works are not on the top of their lists.

Rather, consumers are more interested in books dealing with practical issues that can boost their professional careers, or popular fiction works that help them escape the harsh realities of life.

It is now almost a redundancy to mention the phenomenal popularity of the four-volume "Harry Potter" series, which dominated the Korean book market by selling about 2.5 million copies.

It is not difficult to se that, while works of pure literature are slowly disappearing from bookstore shelves, the status of popular literature is steadily rising. Till now, the literary circle has largely ignored this trend, writing popular novels off as "inferior" and "vulgar" forms of entertainment, not fire for the honor of being categorized as literature at all.

Nowadays, however, the popularity of popular literature is continuously skyrocketing, making waves across the realm of belleslettres, wrenching the literati out of their state of denial.

In the midst of the changes in readers’ tastes, more academics are showing interest in the appeal of popular literature, holding symposiums and writing critiques on the subject.

With this newfound interest, voices calling for reform within the confines of the literary sphere are growing louder and stronger.

One of the cries for change is made by Prof. Kim Seong-don, an English professor at Seoul National University, who stated his views in the biweekly "The Korean Publishing Journal."

On why people turn away from pure literature towards popular literature, he writes: "Popular literature provides readers with the ‘enjoyment and emotion’ that pure literature cannot."

He goes on to elaborate: "Pure literature, which is estranged from reality and saturated with a sense of privilege, no longer appeals to the masses. Literature is increasingly losing its power and charm, either by obsessing with meta-discourse and disregarding the individual, or by fixating on trifles and missing what is important."

According to Kim, in contrast to the beginning of the 20th century, when believers of modernism regarded abstruseness as the essence of art, towards the end of the century, with the advent of postmodernism, art burst out from its ivory tower into the streets and everyday life.

He states that this change, along with the diversification of media and the proliferation of information, rendered inevitable the rise of popular literature and the demise of pure literature, while causing the boundaries between pure and popular to crumble.

"Highbrow culture now stands at a crossroad. It has a choice of either isolating itself even more and ending up as a relic in a museum, or joining forces with popular art, thereby expanding its territory to pursue new possibilities."

He points out that, unlike the U.S., where the masses and popular culture form the majority, the "yangban," the Korean nobility, and highbrow culture has formed the basis in Korea, which explains the peculiar distrust and prejudice Koreans harbor against pop culture.

"In the case of Koreans, who regard everything that is not high culture as pop culture, pop culture itself signifies low culture. That is why Koreans are more concerned about the overflow of pop culture. There is even a tendency to view the alliance between high and pop culture as the deterioration of high culture, rather than the improvement of pop culture."
Kim reminds us that the much acclaimed Edgar Allen Poe invented the detective story, that Hemingway, Faulkner and Fitzgerald published novels in popular magazines and that the masters of British fantasy and SF novels were professors at Oxford and Cambridge.

"As long as pure literature refuses to change and insists on boundaries, while continuing to wallow in the nostalgia of its pas glory, people will continue to read popular literature. The 2lst century will become the epoch of pop culture and popular literature. The survival and prosperity of pure literature depends solely on new styles, new techniques and new development of imagination," he concludes.