ScholarWorks@숙명여자대학교

초록

Lee O–duk was born during the Japanese colonial period and grew up under colonial education, yet he was an educator and writer who took the lead in preserving and revitalizing the Korean Language more than anyone else. In order to truly understand Lee O–duk’s arguments, theories, and values, it is essential to study his writing style–the very outcome of those ideas. This study views the intuitive psychological impression of Lee O–duk’s writing as a “style that revivies the Korean language” and analyzes its linguistic characteristics and underlying spirit through an examination of Lee O–duk’s Diary, focusing on word choice, sentence structure, narrative style, rhetoric, perspective, and attitude. Lee O–duk primarily used spoken–style words and sentence structures. His writings contain a low proportion of Sino–Korean words, foreign languages, and loanwords, instead reviving spoken Korea through native vocabulary and grammar. He employed declarative sentence endings such as “–ji,” “–ra,” and “–deora,” which are rarely used in modern writing, and adjusted the accompanying pre–final endings to create more nuanced and vivid expressions. He primarily used connected (compound) sentences, employing a variety of connective endings and particles to create a sense of rhythm and make pronunciation more natural and comfortable. The narrative style of his diary mainly draws on everyday events as subject matter. Rather than engaging in abstract reflection, he adopts a descriptive approach that presents these events as scenes. He enhances the expressive power of his writing by using parentheses in various rhetorical ways to convey inner thoughts. His writing often conveys feelings of anger and resentment, using a passionate tone marked by vulgar language and exclamation marks to capture the immediacy of spoken expression. Lee O–duk viewed people and the world with a clear and honest gaze, and he wrote with a critical attitude whenever language and reality, or speech and action, were not in harmony. Lee O–duk’s style of reviving the Korean language stems from a mindset that values speech over writing. Unlike writing, speech is action–it is essential to life. When speech and life are viewed with the same clarity as Lee O–duk’s perspective, it becomes clear that his lifelong advocacy for a “pure Korean language” is fundamentally different from rigid nationalist rhetoric. This study is an attempt not only to position Lee O–duk as a language activist and educator but also as a distinguished prose stylist. It holds preliminary significance in the study of writing styles that aim to preserve and revitalize the Korean language.

키워드