‘자전문집’의 출판과 사회적 정체성의 형성: 김광섭의 『나의 옥중기』(1976)

Abstract

Using Gwangsup Kim’s <My Prison Records>, the process of how self-narrative gets written, published, and read, and the differences in recreated identity in the smaller genres in self-narrative such as diary records and recollections and the effect of combining them, are revealed through this thesis. Also, by focusing on how social understanding of text is placed within the boundaries of the given genre rather than the details of the narrative, the general concept of it was understood as well. In addition, to show how publishing ‘self-narrative’ is an event that becomes a conclusive point in personal, social aspect of the author, the connection between Gwangsup Kim’s personal history and the written text, before and after the publishing, is laid out. This isn’t to criticize how an intellectual conducted himself in the turmoil of Korea’s modern history through changing his self-narrative. Though Gwangsup Kim’s diary during the Japanese occupation had two chances for modification after the end of the occupation, it still contains how he “promises to continuously obey the rules of the prison,” which perplexes the researchers reading his narrative when they approach the diary as it is “written by an independence fighter.” In other words, his records of his life in the prison weren’t blatantly changed, though it was released in the 1960s~1970s, which was a period when anti-Japanese and anti-Communist values were clear in society. Thus, it is an honest recollection of acceptance, anti-Japanese and anti-Communist, as well as addition of resistance. This ‘Anthology of personal recollections’ is composed of diary, recollections, and autophatography, which are records of his illness and his time in prison on the surface, and through publishing such combination of records, personal diary is combined with public memoir to create an autoethnography, and prison writing is combined with autopathography, resulting in an intellectual’s political, poetic survival narrative.