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영어

The esthetic modernity brings with it a renewed understanding of the value of the artistic practice in an age that believes the social modernity as the holistic value. The concept of the esthetic modernity is very important in describing the disparity between social life and artistic practice, and the uniqueness of the artistic principles. While it is the critical attribute of art that desires to understand its own age, it also refers to the artistic epistemology as otherness. The temporality of art amounts to anti-temporality, for the esthetic quality that art presents to the social modernity positions itself as the mirror of life. The esthetic modernity ensures the continuity in the esthetic practice, while it builds the temporal validity and artistic esthetics on the integral perspective. For Ko Un who aggressively wants to put the social issues in his poetry, the esthetic modernity is significant as a new way of reading his poetry. For it is understood that such a perspective has contributed to the correction and resolution of the problems with the existing discussions that treat his poetry in a discontinued manner, splitting it into before and after 'the period of struggle'. The arguments that Ko Un's poetic development, moving through the postwar nihilism and the anti-dictatorship struggle, turns into estheticism with the 1990s separate the role of an educative intellectual and the poet and furthermore constitutes a fiction that derives from the dichotomy of theory and practice, belles lettres and engagement. The poet's poetic practice, when he becomes aware of the life of modern life, unfurls the horizon of the esthetic modernity, while in the democratic struggle in the 1980s he already reaches the 'poetic understanding of modernity' and coming into the 1990s, he attempted the internalization of modernity as his esthetic decision. With The Star of Father Country (1984) that is adjudged to establish a turning point from the inner freedom and his life as a free-spirited modernist to his aggressive understanding of the social questions, and with his poetry of the 1990s that is dominated by repentance, remorses, and discourses of recollection and reflection, Ko Un delimits the horizon of esthetic modernity as against the disruptive process of modernization. That is why Far-off Road (1999) is considered the most explicit esthetic decision that represents Ko Unof the 1990s.