• 기호학연구
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• v.60
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• pp.135-163
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• 2019

The purpose of this study is to examine pulmonary tuberculosis as the most pivotal event in the literary works of Yi Sang who has left the most peculiar legacy in Korean modern literary history. Before he developed pulmonary tuberculosis, Yi Sang led a relatively stable life as a social elite. He loved art, architecture, and arts in an omnidirectional way. He once lived an easy life without any collision of his different interests. At the age of 20 years in 1929, he won the first and third prizes when he submitted his work for a competition for a cover page by the < Joseon and Architecture > magazine. He was versatile and multi-talented to the extent that he announced his poems and novels and released his self-portrait in the architecture magazine. However, in 1933, he lost everything due to hemoptysis and embarked on a journey to recuperation in a hot spring resort in Baekcheon, Hwanghae Province, Korea. From that moment, Yi Sang started building his extraordinary literary legacy by producing a countless number of novels, poems, and essays. The purpose of this study is to investigate how the kind of arts that Yi Sang tried to pursuit was embodied in his literary works considering his surrounding environment and the fields of his interests, unlike an excessive number of existing studies that focused on stories about Yi Sang in literature. In other words, this study tried to investigate how the playfulness of literature met with a disease to become a literary work. Up to date, there have been several attempts to contemporarily interpret works of Yi Sang through visualization. This study analyzed movies such as < My Dear Keum Hong! (1995) >, < The Mystery of the Cube (1998) >, and < Five Senses of Eros (2009) > and drama such as < Yi Sang, That Yi Sang (2013) > to examine how they visualized and symbolized Yi Sang and recalled Yi Sang into contemporary time and space and to identify their communication system.