김사엽(金思燁)의 민요 조사와 연구에 대하여

Abstract

This study set out to examine the reality of folk song investigations based on Gim Sa-yeop (1912~1992)’s report, which is yet unknown to the public, of his folk song investigations (1935~1936) while he attended Keijō Imperial University. The findings demonstrate that Gim's folk song investigations actually followed the positions and methodologies of Professor Takahashi Tōru, who specialized in Joseon language and literature at Keijō Imperial University, on the ethnicity of Joseon people and the Joseon oral literature. While investigating them under Japanese rule, Gim kept in mind the diachronic description of Joseon literature and the identification of Joseon people's ethnicity with the origin of folk songs. This study considers the ways this approach was implemented in the description process of the Korean literary history after the liberation in concrete ways. It highlights the fact that Gim expressed a contradiction, as he defined folk songs as a meta-historical genre and as the origin of the national literature during the Japanese rule, yet placed them under the typical genre of the latter half of Joseon in his description of literary history after the liberation. This was foreshadowed when Gim introduced the history of the national literature, or Korean literature, as the science of investigating the peculiar and national nature of meta-historical people, thus fundamentally reflecting traces of colonialism.