근대적 '괴담(怪談)'의 등장과 진화 가능성 - 『매일신보』 수록 괴담을 중심으로

Abstract

This study set out to analyze the narratives of 38 strange stories published in Maeilshinbo in 1927 ~ 1936 and examine the identity of modern strange stories. The sensibility and grammar of the strange stories published in Maeilshinbo recorded some aspects of otherness imagined and interpreted by the colonized people under the social conditions of genre settlement, narrative desire of suppliers and users, and the order and convention of the concerned discourse. In terms of organization methods and expressions, the strange stories showed the grammar of selecting effective parts in the modern narrative elements, combining them with bizarre and unrealistic materials and stories, and achieving the goals of surprise, fear, and present sense. The world view of strange stories shared the guilty conscience that the suppression of others had been everywhere from the beginning and that the suppression would be impossible without the implicit consent of the community. The unique nature of strange stories was in the sense of defeat and feeling of helplessness when people would admit they were not able to dominate or resolve reasonably the fear and tension caused by events and phenomena in the realm beyond their comprehension. The strange stories published in Maeilshinbo had experimental nature as they structurized and displayed different time and space, unreality, and hidden otherness with the sense of fear and anxiety. The present study is significant in that it traced certain grammar in early modern narratives that expressed the cracks of the times in senses and the sprouts that divided the senses into lower-rank codes based on strange stories published in Maeilshinbo.