1930년대 전통의 재발견과 연극 <춘향전>

Abstract

This study focused on the aspect that the performances of ChunHyangjeon 春香傳, rediscovered in 1930's, take the meaning as invented tradition, as well as show the duality of the popular culture in the colony. In 1930's, ChunHyangjeon, Korean representative classic, was reproduced in the various ways according to the advance of the new media and the growth of the theatre culture. In particular, the popular favor of the drama ChunHyangjeon in Joseon, influenced to Tokyo, so Shinhyup 新協, the Japanese theatrical troupe, played it several times. The attention to ChunHyangjeon was embodied in the dual mechanism, worked within the expectation of Joseon's theater circle for the popularity and the colonial hegemonic discourse, i. e. a part of the strategy for localization of Joseon. However, because, till now, the most of studies perceived the political frame between the colonist and the colonized compulsively, they led the meaning of the art work to the subsumption under the hegemonic discourse. This study tried to look through the 1930s' critiques on the performances of ChunHyangjeon in Kyungsung and Tokyo, and to show that those performances and the plan for them proved, rather than the success of the colonial policy, its fragility and self-contradiction. The Japanese theatrical troupe's performance, not understanding the custom and emotion of Joseon, roughly combined of the factors of kabuki with those of the new drama, was estimated as the imprudent experience by the critical insight of the Joseon intellectuals. Also, ChunHyangjeon is important in that it is open-end text, seeking self- multiplication through various alternative versions. The fact that ChunHyangjeon was canonized since the modern times, moreover, in a way of reversing the themes of fore texts is worth the inquiry. ChunHyangjeon in modern times emphasized overcoming the hierarchy by free love, rather than expressing the image of the woman keeping the fidelity. In other words, It stressed the point to try to acquire the modern subject and to overcome the contradictory reality. The fact that, in actual performance, the awakenings of the people and the critiques about the authority in Yu, Chi-jin's text ChunHyangjeon were mostly condensed and the romance between Chunhyang and Mongryong was focused on wasn't meaningful just in the popularity. It is related to the way by which the spectators, elevated to consuming subject in 1930's, read newly-discovered ChunHyangjeon. The performances of ChunHyangjeon in Kyungsung and Tokyo were reproduced similarly in the viewpoint of 'oriental beauty'. However, as the desire for identification, which the colonial policy aimed at, couldn't cross the cultural difference between Joseon's people and Japanese, it showed 'colonial misconception'. The both of the symposiums on ChunHyangjeon, Shinhyup played in Kyungsung, while raising questions about the discordance of kabuki form, the indefinite understanding of Joseon's custom and emotion, and the property of language took the critical position about the performances. This is the foundation on which we can find the fragility of the colonial hegemonic discourse and the a break that the resistance could come out.