김기림 시론의 대중 인식과 지식인상의 정립 과정

Abstract

This paper reviews the ‘intellectuals-general public’ discourse in Kim Ki-rim’s poeticsin order to clarify the continuity of his poetics. From his first poetics, Kim paidattention to the advent of the modern public, and elaborated the issue of settingup the correct relationship that intellectuals should make with those public. In hispoetics in the 1930s’, he took ‘the working masses’ to focus on the discussion ofthe limitations of intellectuals/poet subjects who were separated from them, but soonhe found out the advent of the ‘popular masses’ to present a modernist poetics inorder to avoid pursuing the popular public. His modernist poetics assumed high-class‘cultured readers’, and reflected the 1930s’ cultural discourse that began to distinguishbetween the ‘worldly/low class’ and the ‘genuine/high class.’ As such, his poeticsfor the ‘cultured public’ was continued to the positive introduction of surrealist poems,and also provided a basis for the criticism of realist intellectuals’ pursuit of the ‘popularmasses.’ Then, from the mid-1930s, Kim emphasized as Zeitgeist the criticism of themodern civilization and the humanism supporting the humanity within his thoughtbased on cultural units. His holistic poetics was a theory pursuing the incorporationeven of this Zeitgeist, and proceeded to the criticism of Eliot and Hume, neo-classistintellectuals of humanity-loss. At the same time, he discovered the 1930s’ westernhumanist-realist intellectuals like Spender and Auden as positive examples of thecriticism of civilization and the advocacy of humanity, and based on this, presentedthe intellectual’s image that got along with the public on ‘streets’ and ‘workplacesof labor.’ This kind of image of the intellectual of engagement attracted attention again in the period of the National Liberation. Along with his discovery of the ‘people’,Kim Ki-rim raised the community poetics, and further showed cultural practices inwhich he himself communicated with the public in the actual fields. Also after thefoundation of the government in 1948, he trusted the public who created new wordsin terms of academic work in regular use of Korean and stylistics, and tried to playthe role of a democratic intellectual who would get along with the public.