A Study on Intertextuality in Heo Su-kyeong’s Poetry

Abstract

This study aims to discuss the intertextuality between Heo Su-kyeong’s literary textssuch as her prose, novels, and other interview collections- and her poetic texts, and to reestablish the unique aesthetics of her poetry based on this. Accordingly, this study notes that Heo Su-kyeong’s literary texts creatively appropriate the meanings of original texts into poetic texts through transformation. The poetic text of Heo Su-kyeong embodies the yearning to leave somewhere in pursuit of poetry by varying the ‘consciousness of departure’ of the poetic subject into semantic relationships, which was presented in the original text such as prose. In the poetry, intertextuality forms a specific type of dialogical relationship and appears as a ‘consciousness of empathy’ that seeks to record and testify in writing about the violence of the world and society. This discussion draws attention to Heo Sukyeong’s poetic message, which addresses the question, “How should poetry relate to society, and what should it say?” The ethical consciousness of poetry is realized by embodying the precariousness and vulnerability of the lives of poor others outside the community through ‘voicing out.’ Thus Heo Su-kyeong’s speech acts which harbors a progressive self-consciousness regarding the ‘speaking of poetry’ from the original text, not only proves that she has undertaken endless linguistic experiments to convey that ‘poetry is being with the other,’ but also leads us to examine the responsibility of poetry of this era. In conclusion, this study is significant in newly confirming the unique distinctiveness of poetry and the avant-garde poetics that Heo Su-kyeong consistently sought to pursue.