Diagnosis of the Question of Continuity in the Themes of Lee Yong-ak’s Poems – Focusing on Poems Written during the Wartime Period - (이용악 시 주제의 연속성 문제 진단 – 전시체제기에 작성된 시를 중심으로 -)

Lee, Kang-Ha (이강하)

Diagnosis of the Question of Continuity in the Themes of Lee Yong-ak’s Poems – Focusing on Poems Written during the Wartime Period -

Korean Language & Literature
2023, (123), pp.219-244
Publisher : Korean Language & Literature
Research Area : Humanities > Korean Language and Literature
Received : February 11, 2023
Accepted : March 20, 2023
Published : March 31, 2023

Lee, Kang-Ha ¹

¹전북대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This paper aims to analyze Lee Yong-ak’s poems written during the wartime period in the Japanese colonial era, raise a question about the continuity of Lee Yong-ak’s literature, and investigate the phenomenon. The thematic criterion of literary continuity assumed in this paper is Lee Yong-ak’s political stance on social reality, and the periodic category is the wartime period (1937-1945). This setting implies that some of Lee Yong-ak’s poems written during the wartime period deviated from the flow of consistency in Lee Yong-ak’s entire literature. Lee Yong-ak, who used poetry to give shape to Korean people’s suffering in the Japanese colonial era through the life history of northern immigrants, faces the wartime period’s writing situation that forces wartime mobilization and the unity of Japan and Korea. It can be summarized that Lee Yong-ak evades the subjectification mechanism of the Japanese Empire by means of three methods. The first one is a versification error in poems themselves. By writing such poems, Lee Yong-ak achieves the purpose of publishing his works in pro-Japanese media as part of his survival and at the same time sets his works free from the field of evaluation. The second one is to list both pro-Japanese content and content that denies it in one work. The so-called “included outside” subjects camouflage each other inside and outside. Censorship approves the subjects of Lee Yong-ak’s poem as tools for the wartime mobilization system, but the subjects themselves slip from the net of such a mechanism in his own strategy. The third one is the arbitrariness of the subjects of ‘Orangkaeggot (Violet)’, which were utilized in Lee Yong-ak’s own consciousness, in the political group he belonged to, and also posthumously in the criticism pursuing the continuity of Lee Yong-ak’s literature. After the liberation of Korea, Lee Yong-ak chooses the subjects who are attacked and oppressed by attackers among the various characteristics of identification that ‘Orangkaeggot (Violet)’ makes possible. With this strategy, Lee Yong-ak’s literary world, which advocates nationalism after the liberation of Korea, secures the minimum justification for taking nominally nationalistic continuity. He restores the former northern locality and strengthens the literary continuity during the liberation period and in the North Korean literary circles after going to North Korea. By literary continuity diagnosis, this paper intended to say that the duality of Lee Yong-ak’s literature should be revealed in the horizon of evaluation rather than defining Lee Yong-ak’s literature in a certain direction.

KEYWORDS

Continuity, arbitrariness, mechanism, subject, wartime period, Japanese colonial era

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