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The Implied Spectator of Drama in 1920s and the Changing of Horizon of Expectations—Mainly about the Representation of Lower Class in Bokeoal(Blowfish Eggs, 1925)

  • The Journal of Korean drama and theatre
  • 2019, (64), pp.43-87
  • DOI : 10.17938/tjkdat.2019..64.43
  • Publisher : The Learned Society Of Korean Drama And Theatre
  • Research Area : Arts and Kinesiology > Other Arts and Kinesiology
  • Received : April 28, 2019
  • Accepted : June 20, 2019
  • Published : June 30, 2019

Lee Kwang ouk 1

1건국대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

Until now, theatrical historical phenomena that emerged intensively in the early 1920s have been noted in that they have visualized the emergence of ‘Sinkeuk(new drama)’. However, existing studies have given to this phenomenon the epochal value but have not been able to see it from a long-term perspective, and the continuous process of implementing it to the theater history of the 1930s has not been fully established. This study was assumed that the continuity of the drama history could be more closely organized when it came to the aspect of spectorship that existed as a constant of the play. The existence of 'spontaneous spectator' that were highlighted through the performance of the student theater troupes in the early 1920s could be the first step to explain the original form of the modern drama in colonial era. However, this spectotor's character cannot be preserved immediately until the 1930s. The main purpose of this study was to pay attention to the unique spectatorship that formed in the early 1920s was to be accepted as a implied spectator to the producers of the play, and how it was adjusted through changes in the cultural environment. As shown in the performance reviews of the Towolhoe, the horizon of expectation requested by the theater producers of colonial chosun was to make the public a receiver of the play, and begins to materialize in the form of a creative play that represent their lives on stage. At this time, newspaper articles could be the basis for playwrights to guarantee the veracity of the case. In particular, this study was able to identify the significant influence between plays and newspaper articles through Lim Youngbin's Bokeoal(blowfish eggs). The implied spectator he set up can be described as a retrospective version of the 'spontaneous spectator' formed in the early 1920s, and only if this is the case, Bokeoal can be read beyond the superficial event and into more meaningful content. In other words, the death of a family due to ignorance could be sublimated into a tragic ending that suggests the collapse of the entire ethnic community. But by the mid-1920s, expectations for spontaneousness of the spectator could not have been the same as before when the amatuer drama movement became inertia, the energy of the spontaneous spectator shrank, and the play also established a status as a cultural product. During this time, playwrights will be given the task of adjusting the previously set statue of the implied spectator by referring to the real spectator who entering the theater. What was inevitably required in this process was a formative way to ensure completeness within the text and create a broader consensus, which eventually required the structural backstabbing of the event, called 'the contradiction of colonialism' to be brought into the text in some way. However, this has also increased the threat of censorship. Thus, the exploration of an effective detour was the another task to reach the 1930s play.

Citation status

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

This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.