『땅』(이기영)의 멜로드라마적인 특성 연구

Abstract

This thesis attempts to examine the melodramatic archetype of North Korean novels by re-reading Lee Ki-young’s Land, the first novel of North Korean literature. As you know, the vitality of the democratic reform, such as land reform during the liberation period, led to the development of the North Korean economy so as to accomplish “socialist transformation” through the nationalization of major industries and agricultural cooperation project. And it also gave the cause of a new revolutionary stage called “building socialism” in the era of Chollima. This thesis intends to look in-depth that this vitality of enlightenment could be a synchronic form before the Juche era, which has pursued the harmony between private interests and public interests through Land. There are three main points that this thesis gives special insight into by re-reading Land, which has been well read throughout North and South Korea. First, it explores that the vitality of the time for the people who received the land to voluntarily promote private ownership to public value was the cause of enlightenment in itself. Second, it explores that the virtue of the political revolution, in which private interests and public interests are harmonized is the manifestation of melodramatic imagination. Third, it explores why the melodramatic virtue of such North Korean novels was able to establish the melodrama of the Suryoung’s image. In particular, it is through the definite trajectory of self-transformation of Minchon’s “memory” of land reform during the liberation period. The significance of this thesis lies above all in its insight into the melodramatic virtues of land reform that harmonized private and public interests. Even if you understand others as much as possible, your pursuit of private interests is inevitably self-centered, but the pursuit of the public interest requires treating oneself and others completely impartially. Therefore, the two cannot be reconciled in principle. Recall the dilemma of ethics in which utilitarian ethics and deontological ethics can only antagonize, and the dilemma of democracy in which liberal democracy and social democracy can only antagonize. This thesis has insight into the melodramatic virtues of the special “event” of land reform that temporarily resolved this dilemma. Exploring the broad aspects of the appropriation of these virtues into only Suryong’s image will give a diachronic view of the unique durability of the North Korean dictatorship. This will be a future challenge.