민족과 국토, 그리고 미-조태일의 ‘국토’의 경우

Abstract

This article is intended to investigate an interrelationship of aestheticization of ‘national territory’, national ideal and postcolonial practice by focusing on Cho Tae-Il’s Kukto. This has an significance beyond the study on Cho Tae-Il in that it can clarify the meaning and genealogy of this theme in Korean modern history of poem. In the first place, the aestheticization of ‘national territory’ in Kukto is mediated by the combination of nature and comtemporary reality. The way that a ‘national territory’ is regarded in the same light with nature, appears in two forms. One is to show the healthiness and liveliness of ‘national territory’ by way of penetrating a social reality into the nature. The other is to imagine ‘national territory’ as ‘the suffered and oppressed land’. And one of the main themes in Kukto is a postcolonial practice, especially a resistance against the divided nation system and overcoming it. This task is accomplished in two dimensions. The first is the dimension of subjectivity in which ‘the poetics of whole body’ plays a great role. ‘A whole body’, for Cho Tae-Il, means the uniting of will and action, that’s to say, an united practice(‘flag’) of ‘love’ and ‘action’. The second is the dimension of ‘national territory’. The scenery of post-colonized ‘national territory’ is expressed by metaphors like the wind and light of Korean peninsula, a scene of ‘pottery shop’ where ‘pure minds’ play as they wishes. The ‘pottery shop’ is an example of ‘national territory’ and ‘history’ that the subject should newly recover.