글 쓰는 청년 전태일

Abstract

Jeon Taeil’s post-mortem influence began with writing combined with his self-immolating way of death. This article breaks away from the old approaches of treating his writing as inexperienced writing by an uneducated person or regarding it as an autobiographical record that help to understand his personal history. I intend to understand how his writing proceeded itself, and explains how the new working-class writing stemmed from him after his death, and tried to figure out where and how the subversive expansion of new literary writing that motivated its birth. Jeon Tae-il left the traces of acquiring various cultural sources, including films, popular songs, poetry, and novels in his longing for learning. He tried the ‘writing of borrowing’ method by quoting and transforming passages from various cultural sources. In particular, the parts borrowed and transformed from Jang Man-young’s book “Milestones” show that he was indulged enough to memorize and write several poems after meticulously reading books containing various poems of Korea and abroad. His novel drafts show that he opened his eyes to the universality of ‘writing fictional novels’ rather than autobiographical records. The fact that he did not speak in the workers' way but rather speak through existing literary writing form, resulted in contributing to the creation of a paradoxical flow that rejected the traditional and elitist category of writing. This article reveals what cultural sources Jeon Tae-il acquired, and that he pursued writing that relied on the literary form of the elite intellectuals rather than writing in the workers’way, consequently expanded the old literary world and helped the workers write themselves.