근대시의 인식과 언문풍월 - 국문으로 가능한 시(詩)의 모색 -

Abstract

This paper posits that the Ŏnmunp’ungwŏl genre, which has been commonly considered as vulgar parody of traditional Chinese poetry, is one of the origins of early modern Korean poetics in the 1920s. During its short life, the ad-hoc genre worked as the site where such enlightenment ideas as vernacularism and modern conception of poetry were formed and negotiated. Without this discursive process, it is hard to imagine that there came the rise of the discourse revolving around poetic modernity in the 1920s, through which critics and poets attempted to create a genuinely modern poetic form that grew out of the traditional ideal of poetry. During the Enlightenment era, it was considered that the New Poem [Sinsi] had to be different from the old one in three aspects: form, language, and content. In order to satisfying these conditions, Ŏnmunp’ungwŏl was invented as a poetic genre of traditional Chinese poem written in the language of Pure-Korean [Sun’gungmun]. This genre gained a certain degree of completion through newspaper-sponsored writing competitions, in which it was emphasized that all entries had to be written in form of Chinese poem and in the language of Pure-Korean. This clear instruction allows us to conclude that the genre was considered as a legitimate genre of the New Poem, which enlightenment intellectuals elaborately designed. This legacy was inherited by Karam and Kim Ŏk in their theories of Sijo form and fixed verse in the 1920s. In this sense, the Ŏnmunp’ungwŏl discourse during the Enlightenment era stands as one of the origins of modern Korean poem.