Abstract: In recent decades, literary discourse in South Korea has moved out of the battlefield and into the marketplace. Liberalization of domestic politics at the end of the twentieth century has been identified as the main cause of this movement, along with the seeming omnipotence of global capitalism; the subsequent disavowal of 'the political' in literature has given rise to an ethical turn in critical writings. Diagnosing this turn as a symptom of the desire for coevality with the West, the dissertation seeks to reinvigorate the question of politics in reading of South Korean literature. It focuses on the 1970s as a time of remarkably creative and militant thought in South Korean literature, and examines politics beyond the dualism of collective and individual by proposing the category of the neighbor. Rather than representing opposite terms of an antagonism, collective and individual are categories that reinforce each other and together attest to the emergence of mass society in South Korea. The figure of neighbor militates against the logic of collectivization. Neither friend nor foe, neither kin nor stranger, but an eternal other who reconfigures relationality in terms of proximity, neighbor remains intransigently external to forms of belonging based on identity and totality, such as family and nation. In South Korean fiction of the 1970s, the figure of the neighbor thus issues an insistent call for genuine political thought in three ways: as the basis of dismantling the history of pseudo-politicization of the Korean people in the latter half of the twentieth century, as an encounter with alterity that wrenches individuals from the status quo and avails them for realignment, and finally as the unbearable work of proximity that resists both symbolization and imaginary identification in order to produce knowledge in the real.