포스트구조주의 언어학의 알레고리적 서사, 『에세이스트의 책상』(배수아, 2003) 연구

Abstract

This thesis is a study on Soo-ah Bae’s Essayist’s Desk. It will first focus on the narrator’s essays on language, which is the most important part of the novel. And it will be revealed that this is pursuing a post-structuralist linguistics. And it will be revealed that this novel is a narrative that allegorizes such linguistics. Through this, we will be able to gain insight into the pessimistic worldview that this allegorical narrative implies. This thesis inherits the conclusion of previous studies that the “innumerable otherness that penetrates the subject from the outside,” rather than the internal otherness, embodies a postmodern narrativistic subjectivity rather than a modern one. However, this thesis tries to read the post-structuralist phase that deviates from the universal structure of structuralism rather than the post-modern phase in which the novel deconstructs the present of the modern subject. Through this, we will be able to look into the pessimistic worldview of the novel, which is implied by the structural “drawings” of the “post” linguistic signifiers. In the end, this thesis will provide a major clue to intertextually explore Bae Soo-ah’s style of “writing a novel” itself by analyzing Essayist’s Desk which most clearly reveals the author’s self-consciousness about the language of the novel. There are basically three main points that this thesis gives a special insight while re-reading Essayist’s Desk. The first is to explore the musical universal structure embodied by the character M. The second is to explore the complicity between the musical universal structure embodied by M and the national language embodied by Erich. The third is to gain insight into the universal linguistic structure embodied by ‘I’. By contrasting these structures, this thesis will eventually reveal that the “drawings” of the signifiers that make up the universal post-structural linguistics embody the meaning of the impermanence of the world. This will contribute to deepening the theory on the writer in the future by theoretically grounding Bae Soo-ah’s novel language and pessimistic worldview.