윤석중의 아동극 활동 고찰

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis is to study Yoon Seok-joong’s activities related to children’s theater. Yoon Seok-joong engaged in his literary activities with interest in more genres forseveral years in the early stage when he began his activities as a writer on a full scale than he did in any other time. Particularly, he was strong in cultural sentiments, curiosity about the products of new civilization,experiments on new genres, and critical consciousness about the Japanese imperialism. Yoon Seok-joong appeared to have attempted to put the contents of reality criticism in the genre of epic rather than in children’s songs. However, the existing researches have hardly dealt with the contents of Yoon Seok-joong’s activities related to children’s theater. Although there are not many works of Yoon Seok-joong’s children’s theater, he clearly left his footmarks on the modern children’s theater with his experiments on the modern genre of children’s theater, epic completeness,and realistic description of children. He had another tendency that was quite different from that he showed in other genres such as children’s song,children’s poem, and fairy tale. In it, the contents of reality criticism were described more concretely than in any other works. However, Yoon Seok-joong’s works of reality criticism have often been treated as ‘exceptional works simply pursuing tendencies.’ The aspects of conflict and the methods of solution shown in Yoon Seok-joong’s children’s theater are differentiated from the aspects of other works shown in proletariat children’s theater. To say that he ‘simply pursued tendencies’ is only a hasty judgment made without meticulous research on Yoon Seok-joong’s biographical facts and works. Yoon Seok-joong appears to have chosen the genre of ‘children’s theater’in order to convey critical consciousness of the colonial realities to the children. This is due to the expected value of the social and cultural role of children’s theater in the Japanese colonial era and the writer’s experiment on the epic genre. His attitude like this toward the children’s theater provides the room for reinterpreting the so-called ‘optimistic childlike innocence’ shown in the children’s songs in the same period.