식민지기 ‘조선문학’ 제도화를 둘러싼 접촉지대로서의 ‘민요’ 연구: 고정옥 졸업논문을 통해 본 경성제대 조선문학 강좌의 성격

This paper analyzes Ko Chǒng’ok’s graduation thesis, which was submitted to Keijō Imperial University’s Korean Literature Lecture Course in 1939. Ko Chǒng’ok’s thesis was the most comprehensive report referring to all pre-existing Korean folk song collections and research both within and outside Korea, and particularly those of his thesis advisor, in 20s-30s colonial Korea. Japanese professors’ and Korean students’ study of Korean folk songs on Keijō Imperial University’s Korean Literature Lecture course formed a contact zone in which cultures met and clashed with one another in the context of highly asymmetrical power relations. While Professor Takahashi Tōru considered this research subject to fall under Japan’s governance policies of Korea, Ko, who was taught by him, regarded it as an opportunity to create an ethno-national literature from below on the basis of “masses” songs, with an eye on precedents in the national cultural movements of Western Europe and Japan. This suggests that Ko’s Korean folk song research is a product of the contact zone in which colonizer’s discourses were selectively accommodated and transformed. The structure of Ko’s graduation thesis - in which he attempted to define the essence of the Korean folk songs through the comparisons with the Western and Chinese folk song research - has been maintained even in his book published after the Liberation.