정지용 수필의 낭만적 총체성 연구

Abstract

The study considers the semantic network of Jeong Jiyong’s essays as the romantic totality and tries to analyze based on such view. The word of ‘romantic’ refers to the missing for absent objects focusing on the yearning which is the psychological stance of the Romanticism. Nostalgia shown in the works of Jeong Jiyong is the yearning for the past due to negative recognitions on realities and for the unknown world due to superficial recognitions on realities. Such feature is defined as ‘romantic’. In the pre-modern times, the flow of natural circulation was life itself. Leaving his home where the ‘life of totality’ prevailed, Jeong Jiyong ceaselessly wandered to seek the ‘a priori home’. Separation from the spatial prototype resulted in a sense of loss and Jeong Jiyong felt left out as a fragmentary being in a strange modern era. Catholicism was the way to overcome and to save oneself. As Leland Ryken said, if literature and religion have a common in that they explore the value and meaning of life, Jeong Jiyong’s Catholicism would lie in such context. In the gloomy times suppressed by the 1930s Japanese cultural policies, alienated and bereft modern writers progressed decadent spirits and Jeong Jiyong set out on a trip to free himself from the reality by leaving the late 1930s ‘Now-Here’. According to the words of Merleau Ponty, this study deemed the travel of Jeong Jiyongas the holistic gesture of the writer advancing from the ‘body’ ‘toward the world’. He was to experience in person pursuing the yearning underlying and oppressed in the modern poem and Catholic mindset. Jeong Jiyong wrote about what he felt and thought seeing the presentations of totality in his travel essays. In that respect, his travel essay could be deemed as his ‘body language’. The missing embodied long before became his body language again by seeing and feeling the presentations of lost totality. The yearning which is the basis of Jeong Jiyong’s writer consciousness, the Catholic faith of its religious transformation, and the ‘bodily’ travel were a romantic literature travel in pursuit of the totality of pre-modern times or the fundamental missing of life.