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Politics of Love -the Journey to "Yujeong"(of Kwangsoo Lee)

  • Chunwon Research journal
  • Abbr : Chunwon Research journal
  • 2018, (13), pp.145-176
  • DOI : 10.31809/crj.2018.12.13.145
  • Publisher : Chunwon Research Society
  • Research Area : Humanities > Korean Language and Literature > Korean Literature
  • Received : October 30, 2018
  • Accepted : December 9, 2018

Song Minho 1

1홍익대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

Many of feature-length novels written by Yi Kwangsu are not too much to say that, even though they started and ended with the theme of love. First, Yi Kwangsu's "Mujeong(無情)"(1917) showed the conflict between love inherited from past heritage and newly discovered love in the framework of enlightenment. After that, Yi Kwangsu showed personal and social knowledge and enlightenment with love in the journey of love by way of "Pioneer(開拓者)"(1917), "Rebirth(再 生)"(1924), and "Soil(흙)"(1932), Especially, 'love' of Yi Kwangsu is structured between emotion as a individual and the torment about society, and composed of uncertainty and agony about others' feelings and love as an emotional existence. In particular, it isn't an exaggeration to say that "Yujeong(有情)"(1933), that I wish to discuss in this paper, is located at a certain peak before reaching "love(사랑)" (1938), the form of abstracted love. There is an aspect of convincing 'love' with a absolute attitude to religion in "Yujeong(有情)". In fact, various 'love' drawn in Yi Kwangsu's novels does not refer to the love itself as universal emotion in general. The love represented in his novel contains a by-product of surplus that is not always interpreted, that is, in the sense that his love always functions with a sign that exceeds itself. Yi Kwangsu has been confronted with the issue of 'enlightenment', 'politics', or 'religion' in the form of 'love' that was shaped by the discrimination between his novels and novels of the previous era. This paper examines how the sequence of love disguised in various ways in the intimate history of all Yi Kwangsu's novels, as a possibility to approach his concept of 'love' which has reached "Yujeong(有情)". As we have seen in the text, the subject of whether love is regarded as inherited, which is attached to the other by the leading edge in "Mujeong(無情)", leads to subsequent works. In addition, the dilemma, whether is to be accepted by mistake with the national independence, appears again as issue between "love" and "unstable love" and "unethical" in "Rebirth(再生)". On the other hand, the self-evident behavior in "Rebirth(再生)" is repeated in the Choi Suk's journey to the to Baikal. Finally, the various of 'Love' in Yi Kwangsu's novel is not 'love', but a movement to fill the symbol of 'love'. In this sense, "Yujeong(有情)" was a work that lay at its peak in any sense, and it was the only occasion that could overlap the discursive 'politics' of Yi Kwangsu's and 'love' narrated.

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