포크너 픽션의 타자 재현-『팔월의 빛』의 몸, 타자성, 문화적 기호들

Abstract

William Faulkner’s fictional world offers a profoundly rich meditation on the society and culture of the early 20th century American South. Faulkner’s representation of the Other(blacks and women) in Light in August is also inseparable from the cultural setting of his own time. Issues of race, gender and sexuality are significant in illuminating the narrative structure, thematic concerns, and the sociocultural ideologies of the work; its narrative poignantly exposes the mind of the American South and creates a dynamic discourse in the dimension of the South’s social and cultural criticism. Light in August explores how southern culture constructs gender and race and sets limits on black and female bodies, and how race and gender are closely intertwined, relating to other identity like sexuality. It further reveals the complex layers of Otherness, ‘blackness’ and femininity/female sexuality in the American South. Thus, not only does this project investigate the racial/sexual bodies and subversive desires of the Other that challenge the established boundaries of race and gender ideologies on which southern society has built itself, but it also focuses on the various cultural signs in the representation of the Other whose bodies are the site of American cultural nexus of racial and sexual typification and oppression. This paper, inquiring critically into the racist and sexist significations over the contaminated/fragmented/imprisoned/alienated black and female bodies, demonstrates how Faulkner criticizes the culture resolutely reasserting its traditional value system and exposes the inadequacy of the white southern (racist/misogynist) patriarchy.