The Birth of Korean “Modern Sijo”

• In Event: Modernity, National Identity, and the Realm of the Arts in East Asia

Abstract

Korean “literature” of the early twentieth century was born from the denial of almost all previous forms of verbal arts. Both the high literary pieces of the upper class, written in Old Chinese, and the popular works of the lower class were rejected. It was then that "the literature/the modern literature" was declared as a totally different form of literature and sijo, which had been a popular poetic form for every social class in the Joseon era, transformed into “modern sijo.” While originality and national identity in literature were pursued through journalism, exclusive and self-contained institutions, such as the mundan (literary circles) and the Imperial University, began to produce literature; in these institutions, sijo was reborn as “the modern sijo.” Meanwhile, the sijo of “the premodern times” was both degraded as having no cultural value and confined to university curricula as an object of “national” literary history. However, why should we confine this familiar and attractive poetic form to the boredom of literary history or the profundity of the literary circles? Can we not recover the cultural vitality of sijo? Through this question, this research aims to address the existential style of the sijo genre itself and the legitimacy of these literary institutions. The crisis of literature is an important question of our time. The border between literary study and cultural study becomes blurred, and the Western-oriented concepts of the twentieth century are doubted. This research will be an opportunity to rethink such issues.

Author

• Jinhee Kim, Ajou University