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The contemplation of placeness in Park Jaesam’s early Poetry

kim won kyung 1

1경희대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

Instead of focusing on the characteristics of the individual poems of Park Jaesam, the research is tuned to the traditional and distinct quality of Korea’s modern poetry that converges to terms such as ‘han (deep sorrow)’ or ‘traditional lyricism.’ Even recent researches, including those on the imagery or the construction of the formal beauty, overlook the focus of post-war Korean society and the consciousness expressed by the place. As a result, there has been a lack of consideration of the place and space in which poetic emotions occur and of the poems’ consciousness that abundantly expresses the signs of Park’s existential life. The water imagery and its variations that are often present in Park’s poems can be thought of in the phenomenological aspect. The space of water is either fixed/static or guarantees flow and the fundamental imaginations. Each state leads to a different conceptualization. Hence, the persona creates ‘the threshold of the sense of place’ via the movement of water, and generates ‘the middle respiration’ which, from the threshold, crosses the both the interior and exterior of the pathos. The depth of sadness the persona holds through the opening and closing of the space forms itself into a different imagery. The imageries of parting from the other (friend) and that from Chunhyang (community) make a contrast which allows the shards of sadness to be traced. The pursuit, then, enables one to inspect the ways sadness takes bodily forms in Park’s early poems.

Citation status

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