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A Study of Jung, Ji-Yong's Landscape Poetry with A Focus on His Treatment of Time-Space

Park Myongok 1

1고려대학교

ABSTRACT

The increasingly tight surveillance over dissident literati during the final years of Japanese occupation forced Ji-Yong to seek a new form of writing poetry. His quest led to the classical canon of Korean literature in which he found a model that he wanted to use to portray the world of art. The model he discovered was landscape poetry, which he employed as a source of esthetics because it allowed him greater latitude with respect to format as opposed to content. Since the content matter had a direct relationship with reality that concerned him, there wasn’t much he could do about it; however, the new format posed little constraint. That is why he opted for it, it seems. Under circumstances in which he could neither accept nor reject Japan, iyong decided to overcome the unstable conditions of his time by taking a tour of his homeland. This enabled him to apply the transcendental time-space approach to his activities as a poet in a state that was neither in the past nor in the present. In a situation where he had to fend off the oppressions of imperial Japan, landscape poetry became his mode of expression as it allowed him to immerse himself in the landscapes of nature by neutralizing the effects of time and space therein. Ji-Yong saw nature’s time in perpetual motion as a mode of spatialization, as it were, and, in turn, that kind of time finds its way into his poetry via the elements of natural scenery. Space integrated with time in such a manner takes shape as a “constructed fact” above and beyond the realm of “factual reality.” For Ji-Yong landscape poetry thus constructed is a utopia, which by definition does not exist anywhere in the real world. And that is why Ji-Yong pursued something of an eternity by, again, neutralizing the effects of time-space as he remained buried in nature.

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.