이상 초기 일문시의 정치적 상상력

The Political Imagination of Lee Sang’s Early Japanese Poem - Focusing on “Publication Law”

This essay discusses the familiar dichotomy of modern Korean literature that has consistently shown a unilateral perspective in approach to Lee Sang’s work. The two axes of this dichotomy are realism and modernism. By deviating from this old dichotomy, this essay seeks to reveal that Lee Sang’s early Japanese poem, Publication Law was not a cryptic poem implying a process of publication and printing. This discussion proposes to explore the possibilities of realism in his literature and “historicalize” his work by directly mediating with history as an “absent cause.” Consequently, Publication Law is rearranged into a poem that exposes the shadow of the colonial policy of urbanization that robs the urban poor of their right to live, and sharply thinks of its ‘unspeakable’. Lee Sang’s work is political, in the sense that it unfolds a new world over an already existing and self-evident world. It is a long-held prejudice to judge his literary works as being unable to express historical consciousness or to say that his works are disconnected from reality. Thus, when someone seeks history, reality, and politics in Lee Sang’s works, things that seem obvious begin to lose their certainty and the existing value system starts to crack. Along with such a split, political imagination takes flight.