24 Facts About Choi Jae-seo

Choi Jae-seo was a South Korean literary scholar, a critic of English literature, and a novelist.

From an early age, Choi Jae-seo was an intellectual prodigy who showed great promise.

Choi Jae-seo finished elementary school in Haeju and attended Gyeongseong Secondary High School.

Choi Jae-seo was hired as a lecturer in law and literature at Keijo Imperial University upon Sato's recommendation, becoming the first Korean and first graduate of Keijo Imperial University to teach at his alma mater.

Around this time, Choi Jae-seo started to focus on literary works, publishing his first book Literature and Intellect in June 1938.

Choi Jae-seo began his pro-Japanese writing in earnest in Humanities Review.

Choi Jae-seo participated in a pro-Japanese organization founded in 1939 for the purpose of state-run cooperation and served as a major executive in establishing a total mobilization system for Japanese wartime.

In November 1941, the Japanese colonial government merged all literary journals in the name of an all-out war and published the pro-Japanese idiomatic magazine, National Literature, for which Choi Jae-seo served as editor and publisher until May 1945.

In June 1945, just before liberation, Choi Jae-seo joined the Joseon Press Council and was appointed as a managing director.

Choi Jae-seo was arrested and imprisoned under the Anti-National Punishment Act in September 1949, but his sentence was suspended due to the expiration of the statute of limitations.

On June 25,1950, the Korean War broke out and the Korean People's Army of North Korea occupied Seoul; Choi Jae-seo fled to Daegu on December 25 and remained mostly out of the literary world for several years.

Choi Jae-seo was mainly active in Sasanggae in the 1950s and began publishing work in Modern Literature in the 1960s.

Choi Jae-seo taught in the English Department of Yonsei University but resigned after the students protested in the spring of 1960.

Choi Jae-seo was later appointed dean of Dongguk University Graduate School but resigned after a year.

Choi Jae-seo died on November 16,1964, at Seoul's National Medical Center.

Choi Jae-seo translated many famous works at this time, including Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and Shakespeare's Hamlet, two translations that are still considered the best Korean translations of the works.

Choi Jae-seo was a leading literary critic of Korean literature in the 1930s.

Choi Jae-seo was the first scholar to establish academic criticism in Korea.

Rather than denying the fundamental ideology of proletarian literature, Choi Jae-seo endeavoured to understand it in a wholesome way and even shared special friendships with proletarian literature critics like Kim Nam-cheon, Lim Hwa, and Lee Won-jo.

Choi Jae-seo argued that only when these factors are completely amalgamated into one can a piece of literary work be "wholesome literature" constructed within a wholesome composition.

Choi Jae-seo therefore argued that the critic's mission is not only to convey the people's complaints and hopes to authors, but to help the people understand and appreciate the authors' work.

Choi Jae-seo published Literature and Intellect, a book of literary criticism, in 1938.

In "Literary Theory of Modern Intellectualism" and "Criticism and Science", Choi Jae-seo introduces modern British literary theories that later became the ideological basis for the central contentions of his theory of intellectualism.

Choi Jae-seo then goes on to criticize Korea's realism literature as a "crippled literature" that depicts only the poor realities of farmers in rural areas, arguing that the true spirit of realism is to observe and accurately describe objects with avant-garde substantiality.