예술이란 무엇인가－『지옥변』을 통해서－

Abstract

This thesis is a study of the essence of art, based on the literary work of Ryuosuke Akutagawa's greatest masterpiece, Jigokuhen. Ryuosuke was a modern Japanese genius writer who committed suicide at the age of 35. To conduct a study on this theme, the following three aspects of Jigokuhen were researched, namely, the materials of Ryuosuke’s. The era of Ryuosuke was a time of confusion of values, caused by the conflict between Japan's pre-modern worldview and that of the modern Western world. To describe human anguish more objectively in his era, he created his own literary world based on the materials of the literary works of the Fujiwara period. In Fujiwara's era, the agony and anguish of human life was deeper than in any era, due to the clash between Japan's unique and traditional Shinto worldview and the Buddhist worldview propagated from the continent. Ryuosuke tried to tell us what art means to human life through an artist's life in his times. He delivered a message to us that art is a means to establish aesthetic authority in the dimension of permanent afterlife, resisting any moral or political authority in the transient and earthly dimension.