오장환의 상징시론 연구

Abstract

Oh Jang-hwan showed remarkable achievements in Korean liberation period. We can recognize the literary environments and understand the complicated literary situation in that period through his works. In 1947 he published a new poetic writing titled 「Symbolism of Joseon Poetry」. He asserted symbolism on this article, but it was actually a kind of ‘passed by’ issue with the end of 1920's. He presented the self-developed symbolism naturally grown in Korea not adopted from western thoughts. Also, he insisted symbolism must be fulfilled under consideration of Korean own specificity. His ultimate purpose headed to ‘practical symbolization’. It's fundamental foundation relied on the conflict composition of ‘emotion’ and ‘idea’. These two concepts developed from ‘form’ and ‘content’. It meant there were some distortion and bias in inflow of western symbolism to Korea. Especially it was the problem that ‘emotion’ and ‘form’ biased aspects occurred. In this point his symbolic poetics deeply connected to proletarian literature. Ironically he claimed a concept of ‘ethnic empathy’ by explaining Kim So-wol’s poetry as a typically symbolized case. He considered ‘empathy’ as a reality based concept, and expanded the range of subjects to the whole ethnic group. The core principles of his symbolic poetics focused on ‘reality’ and ‘human’. On the other side he worried about young poets those who fell into the art-for-art principle because they had no wills to revolute the colonial reality. That plunged him into the basic contradiction due to the differences between Kim So-wol’s poetry and the reality based ‘practical symbolization’ theory. Eventually his arguments lost logical validity. Hence he’d never mentioned anything about symbolism after 「Symbolism of Joseon Poetry」. So the internal chasm led him to the criticism of Kim So-wol’s ‘not having a political opinion’ attitudes. In spite of the logical inexactitude his symbolic poetics has a particular significance that he suggested an independent symbolism model in Korea and found a future oriented practical symbolization theory. Many people thought Oh Jang-hwan used symbolism in order to spread out proletarian literature, but he might choose both symbolization and proletarian literature as the ways to ‘literature for human’.