녹문 임성주의 근본주의적 재도론과 도학시의 세계

Abstract

Although Im Seongju (sobriquet: Nokmun) is one of the representative Confucian scholars of the late Joseon Dynasty, he has rarely been studied in the literary field because he created poetry as a tool for the Neo-Confucian exploration, making it difficult to determine its literary quality. However, his collection of commentaries on Zhu Xi's Ganxingxhi, i.e. poetry of inspirations, even if they were written as part of a study of Neo-Confucian learning, is considered an important source for understanding the literary theories of the neo-Confucian scholar from the late Joseon. One can identify a fundamentalist approach to literature in Im Seong-ju, who applied the theory of literature as the vehicle of the Way (jaedo-ron) in the most rigid manner, which was the foundation of all great scholar-officials of Joseon. Even the poetry of Zhu Xi was the subject of his neo-Confucian learning, whose results he sought to incorporate into his poetry writing. He believed that the ideal form of poetry was one that refined daily inspirations into a disciplined neo-Confucian cultivation and expressed it as a literary work so that he could prevent the mind from being swayed by external objects. Identifying fundamentalist literary theories and creative attitudes such as Im's in the eighteenth-century Joseon, when new ideas and literature were actively created and debated, provides important materials for the study of literary history. He was a firm literary theorist who deemed literature as a vehicle of the Way to further explore Neo-Confucianism.