시조: 독자와의 소통을 위한 대화적 서정시

Abstract

The study tries to define sijo (a traditional Korean poetry) as a specific genre of poetry that deviates esthetically from the general European poetry. It subsumes sijo under a new concept of "a dialogic speech in verse" in contrast with the general European poetry form as "a monologic speech in verse". First, this study shows that the dialogic speech of sijo can be analyzed into the pragmatical dimension between the text and the reader. The colorful verb endings used for a dialog evokes a strong sympathy in the reader’s mind and make him spontaneously absorbed in the fictive world, while the descriptive verbs of the most modern European poetry dissociate the reader from the fictive world as a neutral description of the observed things or as a artificial construction of the words material. The dialogic speech of sijo is also found in the semantic dimension of the text itself. A plaintive call of the lyric subject, addressed to another lyric object like "a cuckoo singing", "wild gooses flying", "a dog barking", "a pumpkin swearing the tendril", "a wanderer" etc. makes the reader immensely affected with the emotion of the subject. The emotional identification of the reader into lyric subject is ascribed to the semiotical process of spoken language with its illocutionary force that works under the belief of existence of a social community as a macrosubject in Lacan's sense within which the lyric subject of sijo and the public have communicated reciprocally in the Chosun dynasty along, and which is also nowadays in the alienation of the modern civilization to revive.