기형도 시에 나타난 침상도시(bed town)의 로컬리티 연구

Abstract

Gi Hyeong-do lived in ‘Gwangmyeong’ for 25 years, from his childhood till he died at an early age of twenty-nine. In the 1980s, ‘Gwangmyeong’ (Siheung-gun, Gyeonggi-do, at the time) was a hinterland of Seoul, a farming village, but it is transformed into a bed town functionally distributed through industrialization. He captures anonymity of the urban crowd through strollers’ eyes of ‘unfamiliarity’ and ‘distancing’ on urban streets and gives form to that in his works with a unique method, for the issue of anonymity that urbanization brought about causes issues of the modification of the senses and gaze and at the same time, affects the form of expression, which is based in urban placeness, in other words, the system of representation. This study regards ‘unfamiliarity, stiffness and emptiness’ as the dominant spatial image of Gi Hyeong-do’s poetry and definitely reveals that this spatial recognition occurs in the locality of the bed town. The spatial representation of the ‘bed town’ mentioned here is not just limited to ‘Gwangmyeong,’ but also brings the surrounding cities of ‘Seoul,’ together. This awareness of space and location in his poetry re-evaluates the results of the existing research that used abstract and universal approaches, apart from reality, which shows that his poetry is based on specific placeness in the reality. Asking about the locality of the bed town in Gi Hyeong-do’s poetry becomes a method of finding the root of life, reflecting on the loss of place in the surrounding cities subordinate to ‘Seoul’ and asking about the reason why we came to lose the place.