A Study on the ‘Visuality’ of Korean Modern Novels : Focusing on the ‘visuality’ of Yeom Sang Seop’s Manseajeon

This study aims to analyze the meanings of 'visuality' in literature, especially in novels from a pictural point of view. Novels and paintings have a common ground, since both of them are based on the act of 'seeing' and the 'narrative'. Novels, however, take a very different medium, in that they represent the scenes and situations through in the form of language, a highly symbolic system. The most important device that reveals the visuality in literature is 'point of view'. The theory of 'point of view' had been developed with 'law of perspective', a core principle of modern Western painting. Nonetheless, there are several difficulties in applying 'law of perspective' in paintings directly to the theory of 'point of view' in literature. This study is focusing on the concept of 'discovery of landscape', which was developed by Karatani Kojin, as one of the criteria to measure the 'visuality' in modern novels. Unlike the problem of 'point of view', this is connected with ‘inner discovery’, another conceptual word by Karatani Kojin, in that the expression of the narrator’s inner modern perception toward the described scene. By applying the methodology that analyzes Kunikida Doppo and his works, who was mentioned by Karatani Kojin as the first writer to discover modern ‘landscape’ in Japanese novels, I analyzed Yeom Sang Seop’s “Manseajeon”, who was recognized to some extent to achieve the ‘discovery of landscape’ in the early days of our modern novel history. Throughout this analysis process, I tried to trace how the conceptual world of 'landscape painting', which was transcendentally innated in the Chinese character culture, has been transformed to the world of modern landscape by Western visual system.