이효석 문학의 유토피아 지향과 낭만적 요소

Abstract

Researchers have divided the literature of Lee Hyo-seok into the former and latter period around Money in 1933 and evaluated his works as companion literature, lyrical literature, eroticism literature, or urban novels. This study saw romanticity as a consistent feature throughout his literature characterized by a broad amplitude and variety. Previous studies mentioned aestheticism or the art-for-art principle to discuss his literature, and the present study set out to reinterpret his works according to romantic realism rather than aestheticism of overturning the values of art and life in an extreme fashion. The author stated that simple reproduction- or imitation-based realism literature was not good art or literature and insisted that art would be fulfilled when it held "minimum romanticism and maximum reality." In his novels that made literature in harmony of dreams and reality, truth and joy, and life and poetry, Lee revealed his perceptions of reality through the criticism of civilization and disillusionment of modern people. His romantic characteristics were attributed to his wanderings through the world of books influenced by works of Irish writers and British Romantic poets and to the curriculums of English Literature Department at Keijō Imperial University where he attended. Being indulged in the literature of Chekhov, Synge, Shelley, Yeats, Rousseau, Heine, Goethe, and Whitman and having reading experiences with such works as Emile, Cuore, and Les Miserables, he turned the reality of colonized Joseon into an allegory and led it toward realism literature of revolution and romanticity. Speaking of topics, his romanticity was represented by his loss of romantic hometown and orientation toward Utopia. Wandering and traveling around in search of their original egos throughout life, the writer and his protagonists were oriented toward Vladivostok in the northern country, nature(mountains and plains), hometowns, the "house with an apricot tree," the green house, Harbin in Manchuria(West), and Pyeongyang(Joseon) and longed for and followed the social classes, sex, ego, the body, and the West. The feeling of missing hometowns and some places far away is a characteristic of romanticists. The deterritorialization and reterritorialization of Paradise-Paradise Lost-Paradise Regained embody the romantic irony of repeating self-creation and self-destruction. Lee's romantic techniques in his literature from the perspective of formal aesthetics embody artistically cities, streets, nature, mountains and plains, rooms, and houses by turning the word sequences into images and express arbitrarily such words as "green consciousness" and "prosaic" by turning them into concepts or images. In addition, he depicts his characters and expresses his topics through the materials of Greek myths, the Bible, European Romantic works, movies, art, and music. In his novels, male and female protagonists are described as Helen of Greece, Deirdre of the Sorrows, Venus, Adonis, Adam and Eve, and Agnes. His male protagonists are, in particular, noble dandies or feminized men that value fashion, appearance, and the right beginning. Those findings indicate that Lee's literature from the early days to the later days was filled with his missing for Utopia and his orientation toward some places far away, showed characters of poetic spirit and romantic disposition, and was depicted in symbols, suggestions, images, and signs, thus holding romantic elements based on realism.