『만인보』의 시적 서사와 민중성 연구

Abstract

In Ko Un’s Man-in-bo, its individual poems inherit the tradition of realistic poems by taking the form of narrative poem that spins out the contents of a story or episode and, at the same time, show a new form of poetic narrative by restoring the contemporary history of Korean people through the sequence form. Paying attention to the fact that Ko Un describes a large group of people in the frame of the ‘poetry’ genre, the present study examined literary devices to show narrative accomplishments distinguished from narratives in novels. From the results of this study, we found that Man-in-bo structures narratives in the following ways. (1) Man-in-bo takes the structure of narrative that expands individuals’ life to the life of the whole through the sequence form and builds national history inductively from the life of individual actors. (2) Man-in-bo shows numerous people’s diverse lives in around 3,400 poems. In other words, it establishes common people, which have been isolated from the mainstream of history, as the main actors of national history by juxtaposing historically, hierarchically and ethically heterogeneous figures side by side with reserving the judgment of value rather than presenting them antagonistically. (3) The composition of individual poems in Man-in-bo suggests that the poems are linked to Korean traditional literary styles such as Chinese narrative poetry and jeon. The present study was focused more on how Man-in-bo could cultivate popular narratives through the sum of individual poems than on inquiring into the lyrical texture of individual works in Man-in-bo. This is a meaning and, at the same time, a limitation of this study.