생태학적 사유와 『잔디숲 속의 이쁜이』

Abstract

This study aims to identify the aspiration of the society that Lee Won-soo pursued by understanding his work 「Yibbeonee In The Grass Forest」 based on ecological reasoning and construing the work again from an ecological perspective. He asserted that the alienated and the weak should create an ideal society by mustering the power of wisdom and love because an individual ought to be helpless in front of violent political authority. He had emphasized this through his poems, children’s books, and juvenile books since the liberation; however, through a review of this issue using ecological reasoning,compassion toward a small thing by ecological imagination, which has governed every corner of his works, appears, and such a perception enables us to have a sound mind by leading us to the circulation of life. In 「Yibbeonee In The Grass Forest」, the binarity, namely, the oppression and the freedom Lee Won-soo borrowed as important motifs, is deeply associated with that of human and nature. Traditionally, people have restricted an individual by laying an emphasis on regulations according to conventions and customs, whereas nature moves according to the natural biological rhythm. Meanwhile, men stand on authority by a ruling attribute in the male-oriented patriarchal order, whereas women have been accustomed to the respect for life and the law of circulation, and tend to adapt to nature. In this regard,the author’s thought is greatly different from a patriarchal awareness, which is well discovered during the process as Yibbeonee makes a new family. In the circulatory concept of time in this book, it is unimaginable to separate life even from death. The thought that life is connected to death was particularly well demonstrated in the scene where the granddaddy as a scholar left his will to Yibbeonee and Ttolttolee. Also, the conclusion that proposed a community which would empower people to consider others first and respect each other, made the future of ‘the nation of Yibbeonee and Ttolttolee’seem to be a place full of ecological imagination.