Locality as an Interpretant of Regional Legends Including the Case of “Legend of Jungang Pagoda” in Chungju

In Korea, literary studies on locality address either the “regionality of literature” or the “literariness of the region.” These studies reveal the limitations of reducing the region to literature or subordinating literature to its region. To avoid reducing or subordinating the two different layers of the worlds of “locality” and “literature” into a single world, it is essential to reveal and clarify the characteristics of “locality captured by literature”, by targeting the “literature that contains the locality” of a certain region. This requires clarifying the concept of locality and understanding how it is signified when represented through the medium of literature. We have attempted to substantiate locality by utilizing the “social structure” proposed by geographers to capture locality as a concept of regional identity and the “categories” devised by Peirce to categorize the natural world and human thought. To understand how this substantiated locality (regional identity) is represented in literary texts, we analyzed the interpretants of signs that refer to the objects from the perspective of semiosis. The legend as a representamen refers to the locality of reality, and the interpretant of this representamen becomes the locality in the literary text that must be captured in the legend. In this way, three legends related to Jungang Pagoda in Chungju were analyzed. While the contents of the legends is different, they all have in common that they are talking about the place where the pagoda is located, “Chungju”. The place is a sacred site, the center of the country, and a space that could become the capital, but because of that, it was oppressed by the central government at the time. The locality represented by these legends continues to be accepted and reinterpreted by the local people in the present day, influencing their understanding of their region and the formation of desires through that region. The locality revealed through the analysis of literary texts is not the form of the object itself that exist. Rather, the categories of locality as interpretants, which include “intrinsic uniqueness”, “relational distinctiveness”, and “symbolic identity”, pertain to their characteristics. Furthermore, when abstracting and categorizing the characteristics of these interpretants as signs, they can be described as “arbitrary/subjective/self-sufficient”, “relational/relative/indexical”, and “faith-based/customary/dominant”.