21세기 현대시와 멜랑콜리의 시학

Abstract

This paper ’s purpose is a consideration with the multi-layered rhetorical constructive method in the center of how the melancholic poetics of the 21st century in intimate connection with the postmodernism or post-capitalism has manifested. This poetic symptom of melancholy not only has a distinctive feature which has reflected on a poet’s autobiographical life but also represents the lost and loneliness which the individual has usually experienced in social life. This paper has traced to how melancholy(melancholie) has operated, and what relationship it has done with the conscious of the time, in poems which have been commonly entitled a word as ‘melancholy(melancholia)’ by Korean young poets. Thus this paper has illuminated firstly the concept of melancholy and its poetic characteristic in Jin Eun-Young’s poem by distinguishing between melancholy and mourning(trauer), secondly the gaze and waiting-pose of melancholia in Jang Seok-Won’s poem by comparing it with the Melancholia I that Albrecht Dürer had engraved, thirdly the structure of melancholy which has been epitomized to a psychological process as the ‘losing its object, narcissistic regression, identifying its object with itself, ambivalence of its love and hatred, and tormenting itself’ in Whang Byung-Seung’s poem, fourthly the abyss of melancholia by observing mainly the allegorical fragments in Kwun Hyuk-Oong’s poem, and finally the everyday pose of melancholy which has been made from the metonymic desire wandering about the time of ‘squander’ in Chae Eun’s poem. Therefore, in each of these poems, the rhetorical strategies of melancholy have been noticed in terms of the (fragments of) allegory, the oxymoron and paradox, the irony, the repetition and rhythm, the metaphoric transference, the metonymic transference, the aphorism, the speech, the grotesque, the fantasy, the time and space, the feeling, etc. In recent poems of Korean young poets, melancholy has become both an everyday emotion and an essential impulse in Korean modern poetry of the 21st century, and has been recognized as a possibility of its ‘new’ poetics. And it is to be said that everyday discovery of melancholy and its variety of rhetorical strategies have implied processes of the emotional and poetical practices of poetry for reviving as the new poetry. They have been by no means inferior to discussions about the gaze, structure, abyss, and pose of the 21st poetics. In this sense it is consequently to be said that this paper has meant a work to explore a variety of the melancholic rhetorics and its possibility of being a poetics of the 21st century.