『소년이 온다』 이탤릭체의 담화적 특성: 한강과 데버러 스미스

Abstract

In English narratives italics are used as punctuation conventions which cover titles of books or songs, foreign words and quotations. In addition they are used to emphasize narrative information to highlight their importance to the readers (Douglas 2007). However, unlike English, italics are rarely used by Korean writers. One of the exceptions is Han Kang who has been known to employ italics as one of her styles in her novels since 『채식주의자』 (chaysikcwuuija) in 2007. The purpose of this paper is to show what discourse functions are loaded in italics in the novel 『소년이 온다』 (soyon-i on-ta) and its translated text Human Acts because italics are extensively used in this novel when compared with 『채식주의자』. For this we have examined her interviews to see how the writer herself characterizes her use of italics. It has been found that she uses them to emit the painful voices of the victims or the oppressed in her novels which are deeply located in her deep mind. By examing the cases of italics in detail used in Chapter 1 of the novel, we have found that two main discourse functions of italics are used. As narrative emphasis, one of them is to highlight the painful voices of the main character, Dongho such feelings as worries, anger, and resentment. The other function of the italics is to change the viewpoint of the story from the third person narrator to the main character. In the English translation of the novel, more cases of italics are found because the two songs in the source text are translated in italics due to one of the punctuation conventions of italics. Moreover, the translator Smith is found to make use of the narrative emphatic function of the italics by adding more cases of italics to highlight the voices of characters, Dongho’s brother and Chengdae’s sister which reside deeply in Dongho’s memory.