휴전 직후 염상섭 소설에 나타난 공간 연구―피난지와 환도지에서 나타나는 모순성을 중심으로―

Abstract

Yeom Sang-Seop is an author who has left an important trace in Korean literature by actively performing the work activities from the Japanese colonial era to after the Korean War. However, his works appeared after the Korean War in the middle of the 1950s that are classified into works of the latter part, did not grab much attention in the aspect of research compared to his other works published before. Yeom Sang-Seop’s works of this time were regarded as showing the literary tendency different from the previous time, which was not evaluated in the positive category. However, the recent evaluation of Yeom Sang-Seop’s latter novels is out of the past perception of discussion judging them as limited works entangled in everyday life. In other words, it was argued that Yeom Sang-Seop’s latter novels would also show the postwar politics and social consciousness, which is revealed through individuals’ ethics and morals. For this reason, Yeom Sang-Seop’s latter literature cannot be just prescribed as ‘trivialism’ and sinking in everyday life. This thesis aims to examine the consciousness of the times during and after the war, which was represented in Yeom Sang-Seop’s works published right after the ceasefire. It is because the ‘realism’ as the world view that Yeom Sang-Seop pursued from even before the war was realized through the ‘space of novel’. This space of novel could be divided into ‘haven’ and ‘place for returning to the capital’. The ‘haven’ is a space formed after the outbreak of war while the ‘place for returning to the capital’ is a space formed right after the ceasefire. Thus, those spaces represent the wartime and postwar period respectively. Especially, as the places perceived as ‘utopia’ by people of the wartime and postwar period, both spaces reveal the consciousness of the times as they exist as ‘heterotopia’ in the coexistence of ‘dystopian’ reality.