정현종 시에 나타난 주체의 자기인식 연구

Abstract

This study set out to examine Jeong Hyeon-jong’s poetic world within the big framework of “changing patterns of narcissism,” figuring out the context of “self-awareness” in the subject of his poetry. The study checked that Jeong’s poetic interest expanded from “egoistic narcissism” to “cosmic narcissism” and set his poetry writing as a series of process to implement “self-awareness,” discussing that he embodied “new lyricism” throughout his poetic world. The poet grants equal status both to the subject and the object through the “identity of the object” and reveals relations or communion between the subject and the object through imagination. The subject and the object in his poems become necessary and sufficient conditions for each other while keeping their identical nature, thus distinguishing themselves from the violence of identity understood based on the old concept of lyricism. Based on this methodological setting, the study limited the scope of research subjects to Jeong’s collections of poems from The Dreams of Things(1972) to Getting Burnt by Shadow(2015) and found that his collections of poems expanded toward relationship between “the subject’s self-awareness,” which is the fundamental mechanism of his poetic world, and the object according to the process of the subject’s “egoistic narcissism” being sublimated into “cosmic narcissism.” Jeong builds relations through mutual communion between the subject and the object throughout his poetic world, thus performing “self-awareness.” As the object refers to “everything” capable of “hylozoic communion” in his poetic world, the object in his early poems changes into the society(history) in his middle works and the world(nature) in his later works. The changing progress of the object referred to as a thing in his poetic world is a key factor to grasp his poetic world in its entirety. In his early poems, he or she introduces the despair of reality into “his or her world” and embodies an idea in the inquiry process of the others existing in the world. In his middle poems, the subject faces the society(history) and does the exercise of overcoming to escape from the reality and gain the strength of shaking off the suppression of the society(history). That is, the subject does the exercise of transcendence to make his or her body light. In Jeong’s later poems, the subject captures the fundamental power of life given to individual things and moves forward to the perception of him or herself and, at the same time, the world(nature).