전봉건의 ‘사랑’의 노래와 전통의 현대적 변용

Abstract

In this paper, I approach from the text’s external and internal elements the significance of Jun Bong-gun’s “Love Song for Chunhyang” in how it embraces tradition. From the early stages of his literary career, we can read from his essays that Jung Bong-gun understood the necessity of critical employment of tradition, as well as keeping a world historical perspective of the historical situation of Korea. Jung Bong-gun’s literary philosophy was shaped by his experiences as a soldier during the Korean War, and it was also influenced by his meditations on how to pursue a ‘modern’ literature that will take its place between the two pillars of “universality” and “locality.” Of course, there is a limit to understanding the reality of the “modernity” that he expresses, but we can still find significance in that he struggled to overcome the nihilism that followed the ruins of Postwar Korea. In Jun’s inner frame of mind, “eroticism” emerged as the location of creativity that worked to overcome nihilism, and within the concerns of 1950s in Korea, Jun’s “eroticism” can be connected to how the traditional pansori narrative “Chunhyangjeon” came to the fore as the literary text of new possibilities. In previous studies, the “eros” that appears in “Love Song for Chunhyang” have merely been mentioned in passing, and never deeply studied. In this paper, I will show that “the eros” was the element that fueled Jun’s writings, and that it is connected to the context of his contemporary theories about the tradition in Korea, and I have tried to bring to the foreground not just the aspects of the text’s subjects, but its aesthetic elements.