KJCKorea
Journal Central

This study aims to analyze the reception and significance of the character Gwak Bunyang in the Mongokssangbongyeonrok and GwakJangYangmunrok Series. This series is a Korean full-length novel depicting the story of Jang Hong and his descendants. Its literary and historical value is underscored by the fact that Lady Seong, a royal concubine of King Jeongjo, transcribed GwakJangYangmunrok, which enables scholars to estimate the time of its transcription and offers insight into the appreciation of Korean long novels within the royal court. The series consists of two parts: Mongokssangbongyeonrok, which centers on the heroic deeds and marriage of Jang Hong, and GwakJangYangmunrok, which focuses on the marriages of his descendants. Since Gwak Bunyang’s family is portrayed as one of the key families connected to Jang Hong and his descendants through marriage, it is essential to examine how Gwak Bunyang is depicted in the narrative. The modes of reception of Gwak Bunyang in Mongokssangbongyeonrok and GwakJangYangmunrok differ. In Mongokssangbongyeonrok, he is framed chiefly as a military hero. On the other hand, in GwakJangYangmunrok, he is cast as the head of the lineage. This contrast aligns with late-Joseon patterns of cultural enjoyment in the court and literati households. The shift visible in Gwak Bunyang Haengnakdo—from emphasizing martial prowess to highlighting prosperity and blessing—parallels the series’ separate narrativization of “heroic” and “prosperous” Gwak Bunyang. Haengnakdo was especially popular at court and among elites, a fact that resonates with the palace transcription of the Mongokssang- bongyeonrok–GwakJangYangmunrok series. This indicates that the cultural code centered on Gwak Bunyang operated not only in painting but also in narrative; the series likely mobilized that code as a narrative strategy. Whereas paintings and short fiction tend to isolate a single code, the linked form of the series keeps the “military” and “prosperity/blessing” strands apart at the work level yet integrates them as a dual code at the level of the whole. Accordingly, the series is significant not only to the history of the Korean long novel but also to broader cultural-historical currents.

This study analyzes the characteristics of the bereavement and mourning process depicted in Heoungaegibonpuri(Kang Eul-saeng version) through the lens of Melanie Klein’s concepts of the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions. The narrative reveals a psychological structure of deferred and transgenerational mourning, as the daughter, who experienced the death of her biological mother in childhood, becomes a mother herself and faces loss once again without having psychologically integrated the initial trauma. The ending, in which the world of the living and the world of the dead are severed, evokes the necessity of letting the deceased go, but it falls short of guiding the living toward internalizing the dead as a source of psychological support. In parallel, the film Wonderland, which deals with a similar experience of loss, highlights the potential danger of AI-mediated reunions in impeding the bereaved's confrontation with reality and keeping them trapped in illusion. Both works explore the influence of the deceased’s continued “presence” on the mourning process and point to the consequences that arise when psychological integration of absence is not achieved. However, Heoungaegibonpuri presents the ritual of gut as a means of reconnecting severed ties between the living and the dead, suggesting the possibility of completing an unfinished mourning process. The gut serves as a transformative space in which the deceased can be symbolically internalized, allowing the mourner to recover their vitality. This traditional mechanism of grief carries important implications for contemporary, AI-centered approaches to mourning.

This paper aims to find the syntactic rules of the narrative in the agricultural origin myth <Segyeongbonpuri> and analyze the meaning of the narrative based on those rules. This myth is a narrative of a ‘female human’ becoming a ‘female god’, and the change from the initial situation to the final situation of the entire narrative is well expressed through the syntactic rules of the mythemes, which is the unit form of the transformation stage that constitutes the narrative. This can be expressed as a system of opposition between ‘meeting Moon-doryeong’ and ‘parting with Moon-doryeong’, and ‘killing Jeongsunam’ and ‘saving Jeongsunam’. In the entire narrative, Jacheongbi kills Jeongsunam to meet Moon-doryeong, and then breaks up with Moon-doryeong to save Jeongsunam. In this process, Jacheongbi overcomes the limitations of her innate ontological identity, becomes a goddness in the heavenly world, and ultimately takes her place as an goddess of agriculture in the human world. According to the syntactic rules of <Segyeongbonpuri>, the entire narrative is centered around the narratives of Jacheongbi and Jeongsunam, and in the position system of agricultural gods, unlike Jacheongbi and Jeongsunam, Mun-doryeong exists only in name. Also, if we understand the actions and roles of Jacheongbi within the opposing system of ‘killing people’ and ‘saving people,’ the process of Jacheongbi becoming an goddess of agriculture and its implications become clearer. After repeated acts of killing and reviving, Jacheongbi chose agriculture as the best way to save many people on earth. This myth is about the ontological transformation of a female human born as an imperfect being. She demonstrates the ability to overcome the ontological constraints of ‘female /male’ and ‘human/god’ and is reborn as an independent being who chooses for herself rather than a being subordinate to someone. And her story tells us that the most necessary value for ‘living’ for imperfect humans on earth is agriculture.