1930년대 현대시에 나타난 폐결핵 은유의 수사학

Abstract

This paper examines the aspects of the metaphor of pulmonary tuberculosis in modern poetry in the 1930s. Pulmonary tuberculosis is the disease most affinity with Korean literature and was an important motif in the 1930s. Although pulmonary tuberculosis is a realistic disease, it appears as a major material leading the narrative in novels and, under the context of ‘disease as metaphor’, it started from romanticism and expanded to grand discourses such as the nation or the state. However, unlike novels, poetry has not been the subject of discussion in terms of material as much as novels due to the genre characteristics of concise and compressed poetic language. Rather than focusing on one poet, this paper aims to simultaneously examine the aesthetic imagination of tuberculosis in modern poetry by aspect. It aims to compare the rhetorical characteristics of how they expressed their existential experiences of pulmonary tuberculosis in different ways through symbols called language in the process of internalizing them and expressing them in poetry. Among the poets of the 1930s, Im Hwa, Lee Sang, and Lee Yong-ak actually suffered from pulmonary tuberculosis, and Yun Dong-ju, although he had no experience with pulmonary tuberculosis, wrote works based on the subject. When pulmonary tuberculosis was used as a subject in his poems, each poet displayed his poetic imagination in different ways. In some cases, pulmonary tuberculosis was recognized as a real infectious disease itself, in others it was used as a metaphor for painful reality, and in others, symptoms of pulmonary tuberculosis were recorded through actual experiences of fighting the disease and at the same time aesthetically sublimated. Due to its infectious nature of metastasis and spread, pulmonary tuberculosis has both personal and public characteristics. Therefore, an individual’s attitude toward an infectious disease can serve as an indicator of perception of the community and the world, beyond a simple personal problem.