김수영 시에 대한 ‘시선/시각성’ 연구 재론

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to present a question of how to interpret poems by Kim Su Young focusing on “gaze and visuality,” as a proposal. Since Kim Hyun argued that “I will see it straight” and “revolt” in Confucius’s Trouble of Life express the poet’s awareness of a problem which runs through his works, the phrase “I will see it straight” has been interpreted with various ways, functioning as a key word for understanding his poems. Recently some researchers attempted to explain how "gaze and visuality” in Kim’s poems grew out of modern visualcentrism by appropriating the phrase as a problem of "gaze and visuality.” However, it may be asked whether the phrase by the poet can be interpreted as a problem of "gaze and visuality,” or as argued by Kim Hyun. Some researchers have focused on searching for gaze-related words in his poems in order to explain the “gaze and visuality,” a research that has considerable limitations because poetic language is not directly associated with “gaze and visuality." Many studies share the premise that modernity is being visualcentrical, consequently interpreting that the “gaze and visuality” in Kim Su Young’s poems is that of postmodernism. We in this paper, however, attempted to prove that the visual experience of the narrator in Kim’s works until the 50s had not been out of general norms and that his positive understanding or attitude on the world newly expressed in the 60s could be interpreted by citing and applying post-colonialistic classification of “prosaic gaze” and “poetic gaze.” We argued in this study that considering “gaze and visuality” in works of a poet should not be a linguistic analysis of poetic dictions or a philosophical approach on visuality and that such question should be answered in terms of the texture or direction of the poet’s gaze toward things, objects, and the world.