Kim Suk

Although few would today question the drastic social transformations brought forth by the advent of digital and audio-visual culture, the hegemonic influence currently exerted by multimedia industry poses a specific set of new problems for the school of humanities, the departments of literature in particular. If the wide, multi-layered consequences trailing the still-on-going digital revolution cannot but merit the much-overused expression 'paradigm shift,' so much so in fact that they leave no

<인터스텔라>(Interstellar, 2014)의 기록적인 흥행에 가려, 소수 SF 팬 층 이외의 주목을 끌기 힘들었던 동년도 개봉작 <타임 패러독스>(Predestination, 2014)는 많은 면에서 로버트 하인라인(Robert A. Heinlein)의 1958년 단편소설 「너희 모든 좀비들」(“All You Zombies”)을 충실히 재현한 영화이고, 또 그러한 까닭에 문학작품 원작의 영상화가 수반하는 일반적인 한계를 드러낸다고 할 수 있을 것이다. 하지만 원작 「너희 모든 좀비들」 역시 1941년에 출간된 동일저자의 전작 「자기 힘으로」(“By His Bootstraps”)에서 전경화된 시간여행과 자기-창조 같은 주제들을 수용해 재해석한다는 점에서, 나아가 오늘날 영상매체 및 시각중심 문화가 향유하는 지배적 영향력으로부터 문학이 자유로울 수 없다는 사실을 고려할 때 그와 같은 일반론적 접근은 설득력이 떨어진다고 해야 할 것이다. 영화 <타임 패러독스>의 문제는, 오히려 ‘

“‘박제가 되어 버린 천재’를 아시오?”흡사 서로를 비추는 두 개의 거울, 내지 “두 개의 태양처럼” 끝없는 해석의가능성을 제기하는 『날개』의 첫 문장은, 한때 그 발화가 선사한 도발적 낯설음만큼이나 낯익은 문구로 어언 화석화되어 버렸다는 점에서 자기반영적,자기예언적 발화의 한 전형이라 할 수 있을 것이다. 하지만 그럼에도 불구하고, 혹은 그와 동시에, 미약하나마 채 소멸되지 않은 울림을 간직한다는차원에서 그것은 단지 문헌학, 혹은 문학비평의 영역으로 환원 불가능한의미를 지닌다는 해석도 가능할 것이다. 그렇다면 너무도 낯익은, 해서 이미박제화 되어버린 이 문장이, 소멸되고만 시대의 기억과 경험 너머, 수치화불가능한 시간의 간극 너머 우리에게 다시금 되묻는 것은 무엇인가?감각의 차원에서 접근하자면 그것은 근대의 도래와 함께 상대적으로 특권화될 수밖에 없었던 두 감각, 즉 시각(읽기)과 청각(듣기)의 문제라 할수 있을 것이다. 구술중심문화과 문자중심문화 간의 갈등 및 각축을 표상한다고

Although James Joyce’s literary universe is populated by multivarious personas and even more diverse personality traits, it is inarguable that his characters display a certain distinct set of common denominators when it comes to the question of the rural versus the city. That is, just as Joyce’s central male characters are predominantly aligned to the thematic/topological pole of city and urbanity in general, so too, on the other end of the spectrum, his female characters lean toward the rural a

How to make sense of what happened in Itaewon on October 29th? In hindsight, the catastrophic event which claimed the lives of 159 youths on the Halloween eve appears to have been a dire forecast of bizarre administrative debacles that were to follow under South Korea’s current regime. Yet if it seems too simplistic, or morally disingenuous, to shift the entire blame to the incompetence and misrule of the powers that be, it is because the tragedy, like so many others preceding it in Korea’s turb

Few perhaps need to be reminded as to how much Joyce’s writings influenced Derrida and how the latter’s philosophical enterprise known as deconstruction continued to draw its inspiration as well as strategies from the ‘revolution of the word’ initiated by the former; indeed, the two essays explicitly foregrounding Joyce’s works (“Ulysses Gramophone” and “Two Words for Joyce”) constitute only a more overt testament to the pivotal position occupied by Joyce in the extended trajectory of Derrida’s

Strategically deployed, Derrida’s trope ‘Abrahamic’ forces us to radically rethink the current phenomenon of globalization beyond the multiple contradictions miring modernity and the homogenizing effects of violent uprooting it entailed worldwide. And yet, if problematization of the originary aporias constituting the Abrahamic affords little chance for those in the non-Western region in both critically affirming one’s own past and forging ahead for the possibility of an alternative future, it is

The ambiguous conclusion of We Have Always Lived in the Castle has garnered such bleak commentaries as “retreat into insanity,” “intomb[ment]” in domesticity, “fantasy more probable in fiction than in reality,” etc.; even an attempt to find in it “an alternative to conventionally happy endings” ends up getting the short shrift, since “Merricat’s madness” must be admitted however “oddly empowering” in effect. From the perspective of Catherine Malabou’s ontology of plasticity, however, the novel’s

At the end of his essay “Letter to a Japanese Friend,” Derrida inquires, “How to translate a ‘poem’? a ‘poem’? . . .” thus letting the silent caesura speak for the indomitable logic of différance always already at work within any given speech. The obverse of the same logic would of course dictate, as Derrida furthermore notes, that “another word (the same word and an other) can be found in [a foreign language like] Japanese to say the same thing (the same and an other), to speak of deconstructio

What does Mark Haddon‘s 2003 runaway international bestseller The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time have in common with Martin Amis' much-anticipated (albeit ambivalently received) tenth novel Yellow Dog published in the same year? The answer, as my paper contends, lies in the two fictional works' respective treatment of the bifocal themes, catastrophe and childhood. Although the thematic convergence may appear coincidental at first—the sheer incommensurability of the texts' formal a

베케트의 유일한 영화 <영화>(Film 1965)는 자기반영적인 제목이 시사하듯, 영화 매체가 첨예화시키는 시각, 청각, 촉각 같은 감각 기능을 통한 지각의 존재론적 함의를 탐구한다. <영화>는 더불어 저자의 다른 많은 작품들과 달리 서사적 배경의 시공간을(“1929년경” 뉴욕시) 특정한다는 점에서도 여타 베케트 작품과도 차별화된다. 하지만 <영화>가 우리의 주의를 요하는 가장 중요한 이유 중 하나는 데리다가 지적했듯, 베케트의 작품세계가 니힐리즘이라는 문제와 관련해 드러내는 모호한 자세를 어쩌면 그 어떤 텍스트보다 첨예하게 부각시키기 때문이다. 그런 맥락에서 ‘이중 파악’(쫓고/쫓김, 보고/보임, 만지고/만져짐 등)이라는 분열적 제스처의 일환으로 수렴되는 주인공 O와 카메라 시선 E의 연쇄적 행동 양태는 어떻게 해석해야 할까? 보다 정확히, 영화에서 가시화하는 그 반복적인 제스처는 데리다가 암시하듯 극복 불가능한 니힐리즘의 이중적 성격에 대한 예증이자 예시에 가깝다고 해야 할까,

Few films have in recent years garnered such universal critical acclaim as Paul Thomas Anderson’s fifth feature There Will Be Blood (2007). Fewer critics, however, would appear to opt for, let alone settle with, the fashionable epithet “well made” in referring to this powerful filmic work, although, to be sure, no one will have doubted its extraordinary craftsmanship. For what the film presents before us, by tracing the shifting fault line traversing restraint and excess, convention and unconven

The History of British-American Criticism 2 (1996), which marks the final installment to Sangsup Lee’s trilogy on the history of British-American criticism―in addition to The History of British-American Criticism 1 (1985) and Poetics of Complexity: a Study on New Criticism (1987)―stands out from other works of similar nature in that the text treats the British Aestheticism as an artistic theory requiring spotlight in its own right. Nonetheless, the sense of Arnoldian ‘disinterest’ and the object