Abstract

In certain literary sites, ‘old story’ is often used as a kind of genre vocabulary. First of all, it looks as if an old story is a familiar expression that rendered tales (folk tale oriented tales) of folklore or oral literature in everyday language or an expression that rephrased old-days story in a simple and clear language. There are views that logically separate an old story from old-days story. According to this view, an old story denotes a story in which ‘the story itself is old’, unlike old-days story that denote a ‘story on the old days’. The one that is more appropriate for a genre vocabulary is the former or old story. There are also suggestions that we should take an old story as a literary genre vocabulary to mean ‘tales for the children'. But objections are raised on the ground that tales contain no separate entity that could mean children. Clearly, folk tale is an oral literature that is enjoyed and transmitted by everyone regardless of generational difference. Old story needs to expand its concept into a genre that can encompass pre-modern oral folk tales and modern literary fairy tales, not just as stories that are old themselves. At the same time, it should be an open genre for adults as well, not to preclude a possibility of securing a broad-based audience voluntarily. Old story involves much more than what can be dictated for preservation. It is the original form and genre of myriad stories that can be written, re-written, revised, and newly written after listening to the voice that is mingled with world awareness and wishes of the people of the bygone age and reminding us to write on them, or it is individual works that are still being written. For this reason, I would like to propose ‘old story’ as a genre vocabulary for a concept that can indicate oral folk tale and all the narrative literature that inherited their properties and values modernistically, both within Korea and abroad, either as individually or in its entirety depending on particular circumstances of literary sites.