This essay has a purpose to elucidate the meaning of the new-drama discourse mainly expressed by Keuk-yeon(an academic circle for the study of dramatic arts). Getting into the second period, Keuk-yeon had accentuated the matter of popularity, but enforced the existing goal to pursue the drama as the art, too. By the way, considering Keuk-yeon also couldn`t be free from the conditions of the theater in the colonial era, it is necessary to understand their discourse as the constructed thing related with that conditions. On the assumption that, this essay tries to highlight the play and film - coexisted in the colonial era`s theater - were a media which provided a momentum for interactional constructing, and to research that Keuk-yeon`s drama theory had been affected from the importing of hollywood talkies and the producing of Chosun talkies.
Screening of the imported talkie had been resulted to exclude the existing spectator from appreciation of film. For this reason, theatrical people had marked that situation down as a ironical breakthrough. When Chosun talkies started to produce, theatrical people could not enjoy the reflection benefit anymore, and it made their sense of crisis spreading extremely. At that time, Keuk-yeon desired to extend the social influence of play while they announced a professionalization of theater company and quantitative increase of staging as a main point of the second period effort. Meanwhile, Keuk-yeon considered a large theater as a main stage like the Buminkwan(cultural center of Kyung-Sung), and it means they needed a certain number of loyal spectator for maintaining of theater company. In this process, Keuk-yeon had stigmatized a spectators of the Dong-yang theater as a vulgar people. And to form exclusive spectator class, they tried to interpellate the intellectuals as a true devotee of the art. Likewise, way of eliminating the Dong-yang theater from a field of discourse was the violent mechanism of distinction that had been attended by members of the Keuk-yeon. They seized a journalism of the time, and tried to turn their monopolistic cultural capital over to economical capital for maintaining of the theater company.
On the other hand, main targeted fans of Keuk-yeon was a spectator pool that could choice a play or flim in a relatively free and autonomous way. Thereby, discourse on a artistic value of the play was likely to be planed to Keep a difference with a film in mind. For instance, the Yoo`s romanticism had raised in order to emphasize the natural power and the distinctive feature of the play such as a dynamics of the oral narrated place, interaction between stage and spectator, and subjectivity of the artist, while he admitted that camera has a superiority of mechanical representation. It must be output of practical discourse that presented to find a way of exist for the play in colonial Chosun theater which entered to the age of mechanical reproduction. But, yoo`s understanding for the romanticism had a limit that confusing the inherent esthetics of a play and the problem of a mass spectator could changeable economically.
Moreover, emphasizing the frame of the artistic value strategically, Keuk-yeon had eliminated the popular play on their object of criticism. It means Keuk-yeon was placed on antinomic relationship between the formation of a spectators as a precondition for self-supporting and another goal for guiding the popular theatrical company in order to develop theatrical culture of the Chosun. Since then, giving up competition in a field of cultural industry, theatrical company for new-drama changed lanes to pursue a system could protect them politically, and jump on the bandwagon of imperial power which wanted to use the play for propaganda of warfare.