식민지 근대의 초상 —조이스와 박태원, 이상의 비교연구

Abstract

This essay is a comparative reading of Joyce from the perspective not merely of Joyce’s dealing with the question of (post)modernity but also of the 1930s Korean writers’ literary engagement with Joyce’s ambitious thought-adventure as typically findable in Park Tae-won and Lee Sang. Joyce chooses a strategy of dual refusal. He rejects not only the submission to colonial power which has been represented by London as a literary center, but equally any display of conformity to the national literary norms of Ireland. He chose self-exile on the continent in order to produce an Irish literature in his own terms, and established a new literary space for his imagined Irish literature in the republic of European literature. This study also pays due attention to Park Tae-won’s and Lee Sang’s literary associations with Joyce’s project in terms of their rethinking of the issue of (post)modernity. The 1920-30s of Korea witnessed the growing volume in printing capital that led to the massive establishment of commercial newspapers and magazines due to the influence of the growing sector of colonial capitalism and the building project of some colonial cities such as Kyung-seong(Seoul). Park Tae-won’s Goobo is a symbol of the Korea-Europe cultural traffic enabled by the importation of European literature and, at the same time, a Korean incarnation of Joyce’s Bloom and Stephen displaying the common attributes of global consumerism. The poet-novelist Lee Sang is in distinction with Park, insofar as the former did not forfeit his artistic desire and vision of gaining an insight into the real nature of modernity as well exemplified in a short story “The Wing” and a poem “Ogamdo”.