'Korean old funny stories' are long and rich historical records and include various life stories. However, most people consider these as trifling stories getting abroad and the value of these have been estimated too lowly. Especially, there is almost no study of the commentary part of Korean old funny stories in spite of the fact that it more deeply influence a reader's mental processing of the final meaning of a funny story than a story part.
Therefore, the purpose of this study is to consider the commentary part which has its own ideas about Korean old funny stories but has not been esteemed so far. This dissertation investigate mainly its meaning on the history of literature based on the study of its constitution and contents.
This study is summarized as follows :
First, this dissertation tries to divide the commentary part's history into periods and consider characteristic of each period. In the early period, the commentary part of funny stories wanted to give a moral value. Korean old funny stories excluded the commentary part in the later period, however, because people focused on the main point of funny stories, 'Laugh'.
Second, each commentary part consists of three parts by constitution. First is 'a part of exposition' to present a common principle or law and to be the backbone of interpretation. Second is 'a part of interpretation' to interpret and evaluate the behavior of characters in a story. Third is 'a part of final evaluation' to enlarge the evaluation toward external world and define the truth from a text. Furthermore, each commentary part also consists of three parts by content. 'the comment for appreciation' to make readers who read a story part laughter, 'the critical comment' to focus on moral evaluations of events or characters and criticize characters' bad personality and misdeeds, 'the comment for admonition' to emphasize instructive meanings and seek a universal truth.
Finally, this dissertation studies the commentary part's meaning on the history of literature centering on its purpose and role. In order to know the commentary part's main purpose, I investigate the writer who primarily had written funny stories. The commentary part as literacy device is made in writer's ambivalent situation and their humor and satire is the characteristics of a literacy history. Besides, the commentary part is very important because it helps a reader to understand a funny story with a writer's thought.
Here we can have an opportunity for thinking over the important of the commentary part of Korean old funny stories and I am also looking forward to continuing studies about it.