『질마재 신화』에 나타난 헤테로토피아적 공간과 신화적 장소성

초록

his paper reinterprets Midang Seo Jeong-ju’s poetry collection Myths of Jilmajae, moving beyond existing interpretations focused on homecoming or the reproduction of folk communities. Instead, it focuses on how the space of Jilmajae functions. The core argument of this study is that Jilmajae is not a place that can be fixed as a single heterotopia, but rather generates mythical qualities through spatial modes of operation within the poetry collection that exhibit heterotopic characteristics. Previous studies have understood Jilmajae as a mediator of collective memory and communal identity or as the sum of a folk symbolic system. However, they have not sufficiently explained how the experiences of crisis, taboo, and transgression, which repeatedly appear in the poetry collection, are deployed in specific places and how these places maintain a tense relationship with communal order. Therefore, this paper employs Michel Foucault's concept of heterotopia as a theoretical tool. Rather than mechanically applying it to Jilmajae itself, it utilizes it as a framework to analyze the spatial operating principles evident in 『The Myth of Jilmajae』: the arrangement of space, juxtaposition, rules of access, and the overlapping of temporalities. Through this approach, this study reveals that the spaces in The Myth of Jilmajae operate not by eliminating or suturing crises, but by incorporating heterogeneity into the community's narrative while preserving it. Within this mode of operation, the mythical quality of Jilmajae emerges not as a myth that explains origins or completes order, but as the maintenance of tension where reality and unreality, norm and deviation coexist without complete resolution. Ultimately, this study seeks to demonstrate that Jilmajae, by functioning heterotopically, constructs a poetic space constituted as a ‘place that is real yet not real’.

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