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A Study on the Process of Fictionalization of the Transplanted ‘Madness’ - Based on the Novels of the 1910s

Song, Myung Jin 1

1경기대학교

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ABSTRACT

Rational reason propagated from the West has changed the existing system of awareness. In particular, the rational reason that had excluded transcendental perspective of the world in non-rational area chose madness as a mental illness to represent oneself in others. This was the madness analyzed and domesticated in the Western world. The rational reason needed this ‘transplanted madness’ to clarify itself. This study investigates the process of the modern madness becoming fictionalized with the novels in the 1910s. The new novels in the 1900s or 1910s no longer treated madness as transcendent. But this does not mean that madness was fully explained and analyzed by the rational reason. The madness as a modern mental illness was finally shaped into images only in the 1910s by the adapted novels. First of all, Lee Kyung-ja in Ssangoklu was the first person who was diagnosed to have a psychiatric illness by the modern medical system in the history of Korean novels. The fundamental reason why Lee Kyung-ja had to battle a mental illness was because she degraded herself to be the subject of the others. On the other hand, the character Sim Sun-ae in Janghanmong was the first person who was put to a psychiatric hospital in the history of Korean novels. Sim Sun-ae was a character who was forced to suppress her desire because of the love of Lee Su-il disguised as a romance. This representation of repressed desire was the psychotic illness Sim Sun-ae had to suffer. A side of rational reason propagated from the West and a side of madness transplanted together with the reason came to be narrated in earnest in the novels of the 1910s. It could be madness as a fictional excitement which lost a healing process. Nevertheless, the representation of the transplanted madness could be said to have contributed to the fictionalization of the contemporary issues through the tension between repression and expression.

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