This dissertation is a study on the modern Korean travel novels of the 1930s. First of all, this dissertation examined the meanings of travel and ways to portray travel in the travel novels. Based on this examination, this dissertation investigated th...
This dissertation is a study on the modern Korean travel novels of the 1930s. First of all, this dissertation examined the meanings of travel and ways to portray travel in the travel novels. Based on this examination, this dissertation investigated the formational process of the travel novel as a distinctive literary genre in the 1930s and its generic characteristics. By analyzing its representation of landscapes and narrative construction, I illuminated the characteristics and significance of the 1930s travel novels.
In this dissertation, I attempted to redefine the meaning of travel novel as follows: the travel novel is a genre in which the subject longing to be liberated from the oppressive power or from the personal loss and damages pursuits his will and realizes his desire through the experience of travel.
In the second chapter, I introduced such concepts as modern subject, the attitude of perceiving the landscape, and the Otherness as the analysis criteria of travel novels. In the process of analysing those criteria in detail, I could interpretate the nature, substance and the inner values of travel novels.
In the third chapter, I investigated the background of the emergence of travel novel and its development as a distinctive literary genre. Transition from group-oriented ideology to personal interest and consciousness palpable in the 1920s travel essays paved the way for the travel novels in the 1930s.
The travel novels appeared in diverse forms and content in 1930s. They can be classified into three types. Those types can be titled as ‘the establishment and introspection of ideology through self transformation’, ‘the inner conflict of the subject and representation of landscapes’, ‘the pursuit of a new subject’. In this classification, the year 1935 was a crucial turning point in the history of travel novels.
In many cases of the travel novels of 1930s, the traveling subjects was suffering from inner depression due to the lack of fulfilling their desires. Travel was the process of healing damages from inner conflicts and solving those problems. Travel resulted in the satisfactory fulfillment of their desires. I would argue that the travel novels of 1930s revealed consistently the subjects' chaos and depression caused by the lack or absence of desire and their healing process.
This dissertation challenges the earlier researchers' negative perception on the depressive mood of the subject, by foregrounding its positive functions. The gloomy traveling subjects strived to establish their unique subjectivity through the expansion and transformation of consciousness caused by experience of travel. The subject was no longer the passive person who accepted the custom and morality, but the active person who led the world with his own decision and power. So the subjects of travel novels could establish a new subjectivity.
Next, this dissertation investigated the ways in which the landscapes were represented and their functions. The subjects' attitude toward the landscape in travel novels were divided into three categories: ‘observation and association’, ‘transition and projection’, and ‘introspection and discovery’. Choi, Myoung-ik's Simmun was a perfect example which incorporated all the attitudes in representing landscape.
This dissertation also examined the relationship between subject and the world in travel novels. The relationships could be divided into four cases: ‘the one in which subject and the world make harmony’, ‘the one in which subject doesn't acknowledge the world’, ‘the one in which subject creates chasm with the world’, ‘the one in which the subject postpones making proper relationship with the world’.
And this dissertation also investigated whether the subject can be changed or not by the travel experience. In yujeong, the true news in the bell, Paegangryeong, the angel and prose poem, the subject didn't change. In those novels, the other people were meaningless to the subject. Only when the others became meaningful the traveling subjects began to change. In Honeymoon, Legend, YoonChosi's travel to Seoul, the subjects were overwhelmingly influenced by the people they met on the road. In Design of mind and the Prodigal in which the subjects were changed by the active exchanges and communication with other people, the subjects recollected not only the present time but also their unconsciousness in order to transform their inner selves.
In the last chapter, I tried to explain the value and significance of the 1930s travel novels. The travel novels made it possible that the moderate modern subject could be created through the identification of subject and the world resulting from travel experience. And the travel novels brought a new light on the inner darkness through the dialectic of negation and affirmation. The travel novels also provided a new perspective on the other and modern landscapes. The travel novels were extremely valuable in that they are the depository of discovering the spirit of the period and writers' consciousness.
This dissertation concluded that inner problem of the modern subject and the process of its revelation, the relationship between the traveling subject and the world depicted in the 1930s travel novels raised a fundamental questions on the way the narrative structure should be created in order to construct the modern subject, and at the same partly provided some answers to those questions.