한국 현대시사 연구의 문제점과 전망

Abstract

Early studies of the history of modern Korean poetry mainly adopted bibliographical critical methodolgy, as in The History of Modern Korean Literature by Cho, Yeon-hyun and The History of Modern Korean Poetry, by Chung, Han-mo, which took initiative of the studies. Later, many parts of the former were corrected and amended by scholars who ranged more extensive literary materials, while the latter criticized that the former neglected the background of poetry, literary activities and the evaluation of poetic works. The most outstanding studies of history of modern Korean poetry, The History of Modern Korean Poetry and The History of Contemporary Korean Poetry by Kim, Yong-jik, made use of literary historicism. The author concerned the social background of poetry, evaluated literary activities and their social effects and roles, and arranged major poets and their literary works in his literary history. But he confused history of literature and history of thoughts since he overemphasized on the social background of literary works and writers' thoughts. The major points of arguments in description of history of poetry in modern Korean literature are theory of cultural transplantation, theory of cultural traditionalism, the starting point of modern poetry, and the conception of modernity in Korean poetry. The modern Korean poetry seems to have two sharply contrasting perspectives from its beginning, which are manifested in the interpretation of modern Korean history of poetry. But they are only the matter of standing point of the scholars and can be compromised by more comprehensive viewpoint. The most reasonable starting-point of modern poetry is the Enlightenment Period, and the most appropriate conception of modernism in Korean poetry is the literary movement of Imagism and Surrealism in 1930s, though their modernity was distorted and transformed and different from that of the European and American literature.