1920년대의 시조부흥론 재고(再考) - ‘조선’ 문학의 표상과 근대 ‘문학’의 실천 사이에서 -

Abstract

The establishment of modern literature can be explained as a process the disparate entities realize their own specificities. As the subjects involved in writing realized their identities not only in terms of people, nationality, and class, but their individual feelings and emotions, modern literature was set up as an institution, which triggered fundamental thoughts on literature. This study approaches various recognitions of such identities by exploring the ways in which a group of literati took notes of a traditional poetry, Sijo, in late 1920s when modern free verse was being fervently discussed. Specifically, this study discusses Choi Nam-Sun and Lee Byung-Ki, two representative poets who argued for renovating Sijo, in terms of their different postures towards the establishment of Chosun literature as a modern literature. Although Sijo serves as a principal medium for self-recognition to both poets, their conceptualizations of “Self” are quite different from each other: for Choi, the self is dissolved into a homogenous community called people; for Lee, the self means the poet himself or the individual literary work itself. Choi’s self-recognition was doomed to collapse into self-identified Chosunism against Japanese imperialism and in the meantime Sijo got effaced as a passing medium. For Lee, however, self-recognition becomes possible through expressions of the poet’s own feelings in Sijo. Ultimately, Lee’s theory of writing Sijo or poetry only works on the plane of individual works. Yet this kind of self-recognition is more fundamental than that of Choi’s in that it is predicated on individual particularities of writing subjects, which are infinite.