도시 인프라의 시학: 1990년대 이문재의 시를 중심으로

The Poetics of Urban Infrastructure: Focusing on Lee Moon-jae’s Poetry in the 1990s

This study critically re-examines the binary opposition between nature and the city, as well as the restorationist fantasy, that dominated 1990s Korean eco-discourse and eco-poetry, proposing a new reading through the poetry of Lee Moon-jae. In the Anthropocene era, urban infrastructure functions not merely as a physical structure, but as a vital material agency that actively reshapes human life. Rather than escaping from or denying the city, Lee’s poetic subject exhibits a ‘body of adverbiality’—a state of being passively affected by the urban environment. Rather than adopting an overarching spatial strategy against the speed of urbanization, the subject engages in walking as a tactic in Michel de Certeau’s sense, generating rhythmic friction within the rigid system. Furthermore, by analyzing how the quotational discourse of information infrastructure such as weather forecasts and traffic broadcasts collides with physical distress and bodily malfunction, this study illuminates the hidden material agency of infrastructure and its ‘differential attunement’ with the human body. Ultimately, Lee’s poetics of urban infrastructure does not suggest a simplistic rejection of modern urbanization or a nostalgic return to pristine nature. Instead, it demonstrates a transformative poetic practice that creates sensory gaps from within the infrastructural baseline of contemporary life.