‘이상(李箱)’이라는 장르 - 탈장르를 향한 지향과 ‘창작’의 표상

Abstract

Exceptively, Yi-sang’s literary texts are exempt from any kind of taxonomy, that is, from genre categorization. It is the very exceptionality of Yi-sang’s that gives us the power to reexamine the literary genre as we have been accustomed to it. On the premise for the impossibility of categorizing Yi-sang's literary texts in terms of genre, this paper focuses on the genre headings that appear in the table of contents and body of the newspapers and magazines in which Yi-sang published his work. In practice, Yi-sang frequently labeled his prose as “Changjak(創作, creation)” and rarely labeled it as “novel”. Of course, there were cases where the genre label was different in the table of contents and the body of the magazine. But in the retrospect that the table of contents in the magazine is the domain of the editor, while the body of the magazine is the domain of the writer, it is certain that Yi-sang almost always labeled his manuscripts as “Changjak(創作, creation)” when he submitted them to the magazine. The use of “Changjak(創作, creation)” as a genre in place of “novel” in the modern Korean literary scene was a ordinary phenomenon around the mid-1920s. In the case of Yi-sang, however, rather than replicating this trend in the literary scene of those days, he appropriates it by referring to his keen sense of writing as “Changjak(創作, creation)” when he wants to reveal it through prose. From Yi-sang’s perspective, “Changjak(創作, creation)” is clearly distinguished from “novel”; “Changjak(創作, creation)” is not something in between novel and essay, but rather a post-genre writing that is related to the meta-dimension of writing. Around 1934, as Yi-sang, a outsider of Korean literary scene then, entered the literary scene in earnest, he professed several times to write a 'novel'. However, in reality, 'novels' by written subsequently were not labeled as 'novels' but as “Changjak(創作, creation)” as before. This was because his writing still bore with the sense of sin and some drops of blood.