ScholarWorks@숙명여자대학교

초록

This paper attempts to explain the necessity of both close reading and distant reading when interpreting and understanding modern Korean literary texts from 1895 to 1945 in general. Readers of modern Korean literature works need to have a bigger picture to see modern Korean literature through distant reading after reading texts as close as possible. Diglossic circumstance in the modern period lets readers to think over the complex relationship between Korean vernacular letters and Chinese characters. Korean readers will understand Korean language and literature better by comprehending intertextual dynamics between Korean vernacular letters and Chinese characters. This paper examplifies Yi Sang(1910-1937)`s poem, Poem Number One. Yi Sang saw that Korean literature is “belated by several decades behind others” (20), and he tried to catch up to other literature fields, such as those in Japan or the West, by composing unfamiliar poems for readers. Contemporary Korean critics shared his idea of Korean literature, but have wrongly believed that Korean literature should be severed from premodern literary works for the modern progress, and especially should be censored from Chinese texts. These critics seem to be worried that Chinese texts can deteriorate the identity of Korean literature by refusing autonomous Korean literature in its history. However, they misunderstood Yi, because Yi never argues the separation from classical literature. Rather, Yie puts the traditional diglossic arrangement in Poem No. 1, whose intention is clearly shown from Poem No. 2, which was wholly composed in Korean vernacular. His argument of belatedness is the lack of premodern understanding to modern Korean readers, not severing the tradition of premodern. Yi, who has been acclaimed as one of the most modern, experimental, and creative writers in contemporary Korean literature, was indeed familiar with the premodern tradition of Korean literature. Thus, cultural contents in the field of modern Korean literature should be seen in the process of linguistic tension between Chinese characters and Korean letters. Following this line of thinking, modern Korean literary works could be more valuably interpreted using a procedural discourse from the premodern literature based on the Chinese characters to the contemporary literature based on the Korean letters.