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Ki-Rim Kim's Reading of The Waste Land and Vienna: Satirical Devices in The Weather Chart

This paper is a detailed analysis of Ki-Rim Kim’s long poem―The Weather Chart(1935, 1936)―in its relations with T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land(1922) and Stephen Spender’s Vienna(1934). While writing the ur-text of The Weather Chart which was published in such literary journals as JoongAng and SamChunLee in 1935, Kim compared and contrasted Eliot and Spender with emphasis on various methods of writing ‘modernist’ long poems―juxtaposing unrelated fragments, creating satiric effects, and portraying socio-political reality―in his prose works. In his making of The Weather Chart, he borrowed Eliot’s poetic devices such as juxtaposition, objective correlative, characterization, colloquial or conversational style, and (self-)mocking style as well as poetic imagery to create satiric effects; however, renouncing Eliot’s passive or symbolic portrayal of the spiritual wasteland, he borrowed Spender’s realistic methods of portraying actual socio-political events or characters and creating satiric effects leading towards “rage.” As Vienna is Spender’s critical re-configuration of The Waste Land in the context of the Europe of the nineteen-thirties when fascism reached its zenith, The Weather Chart can be said to be Kim’s critical re-configuration of both The Waste Land and Vienna in the context of the colonial Chosun of the mid-1930s when Japanese colonialism/fascism reached its peak in between the Japanese invasions of Manjuria in 1931 and of China in 1939.