• Sijohaknonchong
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• v.42
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• pp.151-185
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• 2015

The purpose of this study is to reveal the aspects of "Children" in Saseolsijo and its historical implication in Korean Classical Poetry. What was discussed can be summarized as follows: There are two types of children in Saseolsijo, one is silent, and the other is speaking. The silent child characteristics are such as being called and addressed by the poetic narrator, customary audience, passive attitude, etc. The speaking child characteristics are speaking subject, active attitude as sign of modernity. These phenomenon simply expose the differences of aesthetic order. The silent children is mainly to be utilized as a device to maximize the lyricism of the text as an ideologically product by the inner request of the poetic narrator and show identification discourse. The speaking child, gives the dynamics in text by heterogeneous discourse and informs aesthetic distance between "the reader and the text" as well and show distance discourse. These fragments from Saseolsijo's children are also found in previous genres. In the case of Hyangga, 'children' speak for solving others' desire but are targeted by poetic narrator as well. In the case of Goryosokyo, 'children' show activity and efforts to break forced silence by the poetic narrator through voluntary speaking. In Sijo's case, unlike other genres, some literary works show contents about disciplining children and the growth of children. However mostly targeted children by the poetic narrator are predominantly appeared from the discourse perspective. These aspects of children in previous genres including some of works in Saseolsijo are mainly associated with the appearance of medieval children. Unlike these, the new aspects of Saseolsijo's children show the cross-section of the signs of transition contemporary, from medieval to modern. Even if there are few literary works in these, speaking children with activity reveals novelty over medieval-imposed 'child-ness' by showing 'self', 'individual desire' strongly. This novelty is far from infants of the modern concept as naive and innocent children but these children are noted in that they show a part of modernity through various voices in the text, the comic(laughter), multiple point views, etc.