The Sea as a Literary Metaphor and its Representation in the Suijŏn

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This article examines three episodes reported from Suijŏn (Unusual Stories), a text full of fantastical elements compiled between the 10th and 12th centuries and surviving only in part, due to fragments reported in later works. The three episodes are united by the literary tòpos of crossing the sea, common to many cultures since the most remote antiquity. By conducting a comparative/structuralist analysis of the Korean text and other texts of the Western tradition, the paper seeks to identify a common “cultural structure”, because of which crossing of the sea becomes a metaphor of atonement and transformation of the individual. In this regard, the three Korean stories are particularly interesting in that the “mechanisms” that drive the crossing of the sea (and therefore of the “alchemical” process of transformation), differ in each episode, but are ultimately positive in terms of the formative path of the protagonists.