부정의 아이러니와 환멸의 낭만주의 - 오장환 초기시의 시의식

Abstract

Oh, Jang-Hwan is the poet who demonstrated the contemporary social reality and its contradictions obviously through his literary practice living through the Japanese colonial period, the emancipation and the division. Oh, Jang-Hwan’s perspective covers such a broad range as the denial of old customs, a firm belief in progress, the criticism on the capitalistic modern urban civilization, a decadent experience of sailing, an ambivalent emotion on his hometown, which is regarded as an exceptionally broad spectrum comparing his contemporary poets. This paper aims at grasping an inner logic that can explain Oh, Jang-Hwan poetry’s heterogeneous and contradictory characteristics, which are produced by its complex and various aspects. The inner logic is the doubleness of Oh, Jang-Hwan’s consciousness of denial, in other words, an irony emergedby negating both reality and self and the attitude of romantic disillusionment. First of all, this paper analyzes that Oh, Jang-Hwan’s consciousness of denial is expressed with the double aspects. Oh, Jang-Hwan is the poet who revealed a strong interest on the social reality. While he wrote poems that sympathize the lives of the low-class, he also created the poems that criticize the social reality. They negate tradition and old customs and criticize their fakeness. When this consciousness of the denial is toward his interiority, Oh, Jang-Hwan’s poems reveal the artificial pose and the decadent aspects. This paper regards the double negation and the contradictory attitude as the conspicuous characteristics of Oh, Jang-Hwan’s early poetry and named it as ‘the Irony of Denial’. Second, this paper analyzes the characteristics of Oh, Jang-Hwan’s early poetry as the transformation from the romantic disillusionment to lyricism. This paper named this character as the ‘Romantic Disillusionment’ in that the emotions of self disillusionment are expressed with the romantic spaces. The frequent expressions in this early period such as ‘tears,’ ‘regret’, ‘sorrow’, and ‘death’ are the results of the lyric attitude that poetic subject inevitably had to arrive after getting through the disillusionment.