‘물’ 질료를 중심으로 고고학자의 시선과 고고학적 상상력 연구 : 박사학위논문 Studien zur Region Lagaš : Von der Ubaid- bis zur altbabylonischen Zeit(Ugarit-Verlag, 2008)과 후기 시집을 중심으로

초록

This article examines the materiality of water in Huh Su Kung’s fourth poetry collection The Time of Bronze, the Time of Potatoes and fifth collection Damn, Cold Heart, with particular reference to her doctoral dissertation Studien zur Region Lagaš: Von der Ubaid- bis zur altbabylonischen Zeit as the central axis of analysis. The recurrent and variational water imagery in these two collections clearly exceeds the register of conventional nature lyricism. In Huh’s work, water as material is configured as a medium of mourning that extends beyond the bounds of nation and community, toward an exterior field of alterity that encompasses both “the dead” and “those who have not yet been born,” in the sense articulated by Karatani Kōjin in Ethics 21. A close reading of Huh Su Kyung’s dissertation reveals that her conception of water is deeply grounded in an archaeological insight: hydrological conditions simultaneously govern the rise and decline of civilizations. The configurations of water in her poetry are thus not the product of spontaneous lyrical sensitivity or purely autonomous imagination, but can be understood as the outcome of a material epistemology of water internalized through archaeological fieldwork and scholarly training. In this respect, Heo’s poetics may be read as a concrete realization of what Gaston Bachelard called “material imagination,” unfolding upon the stratified ground of archaeological experience, in which life and destruction, memory and mourning, melancholy and solidarity are all thought through the single material of water. This study first examines the ambivalence of water as it appears in the doctoral dissertation, and then analyzes the ways in which the materiality of water is articulated in relation to poetic self-consciousness in the fourth collection. It further investigates how water functions as a medium for a cosmopolitan sensibility that expands the object of mourning from the people, community, or nation to a global citizenry. Previous research, lacking direct access to the original text of the dissertation, has been limited in its ability to explain the concrete mechanisms by which archaeological experience is transposed into poetic reflection. In order to address this lacuna, the present article offers a detailed reading of the dissertation and demonstrates, in an empirically grounded manner, how its cognitive framework is transformed and deepened in the poetic texts. In doing so, the study argues that Huh Su Kyung’s archaeological practice and academic writing do not constitute a dimension separate from her poetic imagination, but rather traverse her entire poetic world as a single, condensed mode of material sensibility mediated by water.

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