구미호에 대한 다층적 상상력과 문화혼종

초록

This study set out to analyze the formation, expansion, and new derivation process of imagination about the “specificity” and “difference” of a legendary fox with nine tails through the quotes, re-quotes, and counterarguments of her old stories. Imagination about a special fox expands in a way of adding unrealistic divinity to her, deriving from it in various ways according to the perceptions of objects. Her specificity is revealed through holiness and devilishness, mixture of holiness and devilishness, ambivalent nature of the same being, and transformation through religion, confrontation, or combination. As more elements are added to them including people’s awareness of a legendary fox with nine tails, social contexts, counterargument to the old stories, and hybrid with a new cultural phenomenon, imagination about a legendary fox with nine tails develops in various ways. The specificity of a legendary fox with nine tails works as the source of divinity to transcend experiences in reality and, at the same time, becomes the cause of “difference” to define her as something different from human beings. When there is a focus on her “difference,” people get to emphasize differences between realistic experiences and everyday beings and define her as a monster outside the boundary. New stories, however, emerge to deconstruct the hierarchy between human beings and non-human being and refuse to accept the boundary between them as counterarguments to the dichotomous perceptions of “subject and object” and “man and monster.” Such derivations, expansions, and counterarguments present the construction and creation process of new imagination and narratives as heterogeneous things are connected together and systematized with the resulting systems forming complex relations each other. The present study led these discussions to escape from the old approach to figure out the creation or transformation process of a legendary fox with nine tails with diachronic logic and see her as a rhizome that has divided irregularly with no center rather than a single homogeneous entity.

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