한국시 전통의 계승과 확장

Abstract

This paper aims at exploring the archetypical identification and the tradition of Korean poetry through its sense of space and time, its sense of poetic distance and the point of views in it. The orientation toward dissolution of time frame and spacial boundaries has become a typical Korean way of thinking, or a typical framework of the Koreans. And the breaking-up of spacial thresholds is closely connected with the disruption of the boundaries between self and others in Korean literature and makes the discourse complicated in which self can be others and vice versa. This kind of spacial consciousness has been a poetic tradition in Korean poetry, expressed in call and response songs and by some literary parallelism. And these two poetic structures in turn take the readers to the poetic context, display multiple point of views in poems, form so-called 'Dialigizität' and let the readers have extended experiences. This sort of poetic tradition has been maintained by the poets from Kim, So-Wol, Han, Yong-Woon, Yoon, Dong-Ju, and Yu, Chi-Whan through the poets like Park, Mok-Wol, Park, Doo-Jin, Cho, Ji-Hoon, Kim, Kwang-Sub, and recently to Oh, Kyu-Won. The circular view of time which has been typical in Eastern culture contrasting to the linear view of time in Western culture, is also pervasive in Korean poems. Alongside with the circular view originated from the philosophical concepts like karma and regeneration, eternity of time, too, is one of the general characteristics consisting Korean poetic beauty and is embodied in a large number of poems written by Lee, Yuk-Sa, Seo, Jeong-Ju, Shin, Suk-Jeong, Park, Yong-Rae, Park, Jae-Sam, Kim, Kwang-Rim, Hwang, Dong-Kyu and Cheong, Hyun-Jong etc. Besides, various 'integrated' versions of time consciousness can be found in the poems of Lee, Sang where the linear time consciousness of Western culture has been modified in a Korean manner and in the works of some female poets such as Kim, Hye-Soon and Koh, Jeong-Hee who pursue a feminist solidarity through the images of mother, home and body. The sense of time the women poets have sometimes appears in forms of time trips to seek the archetypical attachment objects like mother, home or hometown and during the trips they delve into the essence of existence and life, speculating death. Korean poems extend the present by means of juxtaposing the present, the past and the future, with connecting some moments to others, and linking unrelated things together. Therefore the poets overcome fragmentation of time, leading it into the eternity, recreating and spiritualizing it. Korean poems do not simply deal with some universal conflicts among the contrasting orientations and dimensions but harmonize them from a poetic distance of beauty. So, it is this aesthetic distance in which Kim, So-wol sings songs about the time and space existing between life and death and Seo, Jeong-ju symbolizes the threshold space between the heaven and the earth, and it is also through this poetic distance which they lessen the conflicts between self and others, beyond the threshold spaces and the fragments of time. The poets have finally attained the balanced, positive sense of poetic distance between self and others, here and there, bright and dark side of life, in the result of their endeavor to ultimately go beyond the thresholds and limitations, which can be referred to as 'Mu-ae' (that means 'no limitations' or 'free from impedition') and their efforts to absorb all the thresholds or boundaries and dissolve them into a new unity, which may be referred to as 'Wonyung.' These two concepts are regarded as the archetype of Korean ways of thinking. These classes of manners of speculation extend the Korean tradition of poetry, supplying an energy to dream of harmony among discordances and of reconciliation among separations.