심의린의 전래동화 장르 인식과 텍스트 양상 —「혹 달닌 노옹」을 중심으로

Abstract

This paper studies the genre recognition of Shim Euirin’s fairy tales reflected in his Choseon Donghwa Daejip(『조선동화대집』, Collection of Korean Fairy Tales). It also considers how his genre recognition is specifically formed as aspects of text with “A Geezer with a Lump”(「혹 달닌 노옹」) included in the book. Shim Euirin, as an educator, scholar of Korean language, and fairy tale activist during the Japanese colonial era, his social activities were closely related with situations of colonization. Thus, the fairy tale created by him is deeply linked with the education carried out during the colonial era. The fairy tale signified as children’s story has no difference between the general genre recognition of the same period to him. However, on his point of view, it needs to emphasize that it marks with a point at the utility that a fairy tale should cultivate children’s thoughts and emotions, enrich common knowledge, appreciate sentences, and make them to enjoy literature as a hobby. “A Geezer with a Lump” has content relevancy and structural universality of imitation tale, but it expresses differentiable features from other texts. Firstly, a narrator actively intervenes in the content of narration. For example, in “A Geezer with a Lump”, the narrator suggests the characters, regulating them as an ‘honest and good person’and as a ‘greedy and bad person’. Such excessive intervention of narrator disturbs the development of the text. Secondly, story-telling situation is considered in narrative expression. The fairy tales in 1920s intentionally display narrative feature because it had been being produced with possibility of being narrated or recited at any time. The honorific expression appeared in ‘A Geezer with a Lump’ is in basis of the narrative situation. It also has high frequency of using onomatopoeia and mimetic words and hence the story is very lifelike. Thirdly, it recognized children who are readers as a target to be educated. As shown above, the reason why Shim Euirin needed active intervention of narrative and consideration of story-telling situations is that he treated children as the target of literacy education rather than as subject of literature admiration. He was interested in achieving the Korean language education to be effective through learnings. With those reasons, his texts have deviating aspects from what we generally understand as concept of the genre recognition. In other words, he created fairy tales and tale movement in basis of experiences and values as an educator and a Korean language scholar. Based on the genre recognition of fairy tale and aspects of text expressed in Shim Euirin’s Choseon Donghwa Daejip, I expect appearance of genre of fairy tale formed in the beginning of Korean modern time to be clarified.