계몽과 부정성 : 『마오 2』와 『네이티브 스피커』에 나타난 한국 이미지

• 영문명: Enlightenment and Negativity : The Korean Images Portrayed in Mao ll and Native Speaker
• 발행기관: 한국아메리카학회
• 저자명: 권택영(Teckyoung Kwon)
• 간행물 정보: 『미국학논집』제37집 2호, 5~28쪽, 전체 24쪽
• 주제분류: 인문학 > 기타인문학
• 파일형태: PDF
• 발행일자: 2005.09.01

영문 초록

  This paper explores the Korean images portrayed in recent American fiction, focusing on what kinds of Korean images they represent and how those images are employed in terms of their themes in fiction. For this purpose, two works which belong to the same period of the 1990s are chosen: Don DeLillo"s Mao Il and Chang-rae Lee"s Native Speaker. Both of these deal with Korean images in different ways. The former criticizes the commodity as well as the media culture of the late industrial society, while the latter concentrates on the self-identity of a Korean-American in a multicultural society.
  In Mao Il the Korean image employed is a marriage ceremony of 6500 couples carried out by Sun-Myung Moon in 1975, at Yankee Stadium. One of the characters, Karen, married a Korean, Kim-jo Park. Her parents looked on with worry. DeLillo uses this image to posit the concept of "the crowd" in contrast to that of "the public." In a series of "crowd" images, he attempts to define the nature of contemporary commodity and media culture as being tied to a "crowd" and warns of the death of writers and the rise of terrorists. Meanwhile, the Korean image in Native Speaker focuses on the traditional culture mostly based on "a Confucian social order," including: silence, the importance of group and social relations, and a patriarchal family structure. These images are sharply contrasted to American individualism. Though one of the character, John Kwang, fails to be a successful political figure due to dissonance between two cultures, the narrator promotes his acceptance of Korean culture against the dominant white one and decision not to be "a spy" (a stranger) any more.
  Thus, Korean images employed in two post-modern works are unique according to the themes: in Mao Il one is used to criticize the nature of the crowd in a post-industrial media society through the relationship between the writer and the terrorist, while in Native Speaker, a different portrayal is used to arrive at self-acceptance in a multicultural society. In other words both works represent Korean images in two different ways in postmodern society: a positive side of diversities and political corrections, and a negative side of commodity and media culture. The former belongs to the enlightenment while the latter in negativity is an indispensable element as Adorno pointed out in his book, Dialectic of Enlightenment.

목차

1. 『마오 2』와 통일교의 합동결혼식
2. 『네이티브 스피커』와 한국 문화
3. 한국의 이미지와 두 주제: 다양성과 획일성
4. 맺음
인용 문헌
Abstract

키워드

한국 이미지 군중 다문화주의 포스트모던 미디어문화 계몽의 변증법 테러리스트 Korean image the crowd Multiculturalism Postmodern media culture terrorist enlightenment and negativity