식민지시기 염상섭 장편소설의 총체적 도시 재현

Abstract

This paper aims to analyze the totality of the city image presented inYeom Sang Seob’s novels. Yeom, as a Seoul born author, wrote a numberof work depicting various city areas in Seoul. Love and Sin, Rampage,The Three Generations, and Fig show the multi-dimensional faces ofSeoul and its bottomless depths. Firstly, Yeom draws an actual city image of Seoul rather than the imaginedgeography divided by ethnicity. In the colonial period, the idea of‘the southern village’ (namchon, the Japanese district) and ‘the northernvillage’ (bukchon, the Korean district) was commonly accepted. Thesegeographical names suggest that Seoul was actually divided and that itwas difficult to traverse to the other side as it was intuitively split. Yeom,however, did not fence himself with such imagined geography. He showsthat the division was not absolute. He focused on the Japanese living inthe north, and Koreans dwelling in the south. As a result, his works makemanifest the complexity of city spaces. Secondly, Yeom combined distant classes and its social spaces. By do-ing so, he managed to unveil ‘the whole city’. In his novels, heros andheroines are geographically distant from each other. Furthermore, theireconomical and class status are also very different. In this case, the distancebetween one another reflects their social difference. It makes us seethe city as a whole. This is because that two halves (two different classesand also two different spaces) are combined. Yeom is thus successful in representing the totality of the city space. This is not only because he wrote about more places than other writers;rather than depicting only a part of the city or the city in fragments, herepresented the totality of Seoul. This paper aims to demonstrate this pointby using maps and methods of literary geography.