산업화 시대의 이주와 새로운 거주 장소로서의 도시 - 신경림의『농무』(1973)를 중심으로

Abstract

This paper aims to reinterpret the urban place and the people in Shin Gyeong-rim's early poems as new places of residence and round character who have desires and realizes them, respectively, by reading the migratory images during the industrial era in his first collection of poems, Nongmu, with the concept of mobility. The previous studies on place in Shin Gyeong-rim's poetry have tended to repeat and reinforce the binary opposition between rural and urban based on domiciled thinking. It establishes the rural as the fundamental place where the people should live and the city as the opposite, where the people are constantly marginalized and otherized, thus causing existential anxiety. However, this interpretation erases the desire for urban life that rural migrants have for the city and flattens their character as ethically historical subjects with the will to resist the socio-structural contradictions that marginalize them. This paper attempts to reconceptualize place through the view of mobility, which residence is possible on the premise of movement, and to reveal that rural people chose to migrate to cities out of a desire for a better life. The countryside depicted in Nongmu is found to be experiencing the sadness and despair of the rural community caused by rural alienation and exclusion due to industrialization. However, ‘the sense of loss’ that spreads within the community sometimes acts as oppression and bondage for individual members of the community, and is passed on to the next generation. The fact that ‘the sense of loss’, which was understood as a force that unites rural people, works as a mechanism of oppression rather than a shared emotion, makes rural people decide to migrate to the city. Those who migrate to the city form a community centered on difference and seek a new life. The round character of place and people captured in this process captures the special nature of migration in contemporary Korean society and reveals the uniqueness of Shin Gyeong-rim's poetic world.