김유정과 이태준 : 자생적 민족지와 보편적 근대 구축으로서의 조선어문학

Abstract

This study is to explore the novelization of the Japanese colonial policy over Korea as well as the understanding of the standard language and the vernacular focusing on the novels of Yu-Jeong Kim and Tae-Joon Lee between 1933 and 1936. In the former year, Draft for the Unified Spelling System of Hanguel was enacted and Kuinhoe(circle of nine writers) was founded. About the latter year, the standard language was investigated and confirmed. The hierarchy of the standard language/the vernacular was related not only to the writing style or the dimension of the language but also to the writer’s view of novel or understanding of the world. Yu-Jeong Kim, who preferred both the vernacular and spoken language, assumed a critical attitude to the world of modern Korean literature which was being constructed by the standard language. On the while, Tae-Joon Lee, who preferred the unification of the written and spoken language based on the standard language, wanted to construct the universal modern Korean literature by pushing the vernacular into conversation part of his novels. Hoe-Nam Ahn, a peer writer, distinguished the former’s novels as ‘the existence as representation of reality’ and the latter’s as ‘the existence constructed by the writer’s images’, asserting that the represented reality could give more powerful realism to us only if it were constructed successfully. In my view, this point shows that Lee was certainly a modernist. Two of them were contrasting in their styles and methods of writing novel, but both of them were self-conscious in the way of using Korean language. Their self-consciousness of Korean language, represented as a hierarchy of the standard language and the vernacular, was closely related to their understandings of the reality. In this way, we can realize how their ways of using Korean language cracked the colonial reality in the representation or appropriation of Japanese colonial policies.