Leif Olsen

parody modern Korean literature premodern intertextuality Hong Kiltong

Fictional narratives flourished during the Chosŏn period (1392–1910), and a large number of recent short stories or novels in South Korea directly allude to or play upon themes in Chosŏn works. Bakhtin calls parodies “hybrid narratives”; this paper looks at both the intertextual hybridization of an “original” text with a “new” one. In Korea, the term parody is used broadly to refer to any text that reworks a previous text, and the parodies examined in this paper, Sŏ Hajin’s “Hong Kiltong” and Yi Munyŏl’s “Hong Kiltong ŭl ch’ajasŏ,” vary in their levels of parodicity. Sŏ’s and Yi’s borrowing from the Tale of Hong Kiltong, the piece of fiction attributed to Hŏ Kyun (1569–1618), serves a function different from the original text and yet pays tribute to it. Taking into consideration M. M. Bakhtin’s view that every parody forms a mutual illumination between a text and an earlier source, the article examines how Sŏ’s and Yi’s texts each associate and situate itself to the Tale of Hong Kiltong and covers a theoretical framework of parodic studies. The article also looks at the character Hong Kiltong and the ways he is reworked in parodic fiction.