근대문학과 공동체, 그 이후 - ‘외부성의 공동체’를 위한 시론

Abstract

There have been largely two traditional approaches to the relationship between literature and community. The first approach is to presume the two subjects, 'literature' and 'community', and then connect the two with a conjunction 'and'. In this approach, literature and community have equal statuses, and the possibility of interaction is eliminated. The second approach proves that all types of cultural development are fundamentally based on 'community'. This approach explains that the relationship between literature and community is subordinative (limiting) with literature developing within a certain community or all subjects of writing should live in the given community regardless of freedom of decision-making. These traditional approaches are likely to be concluded as logic justifying violent exclusion of others by emphasizing only the homogeneity. On the other hand, some literature has stopped developing within a traditional community and began producing a community itself instead. Therefore, when discussing the relationship between literature and community, we should distinguish the literature that develops based on a community from the literature that produces a community itself. The former is a matter of 'literature and community', while the latter is a matter of 'community of literature'. The modern literature for the past 100 years functioned as an enlightening integration tool during the process of developing into a modern nation-state. The equation that 'modern literature equals the ethnic group(people)' has been dominant by making various tendencies peripheral through a dichotomy between inclusion and exclusion. National literature as a mainstream ideology of modern literature has developed by (re)producing communities of the insides such as 'people', 'nation', and 'home', and many literature works actually have suggested the utopia as a representation of the state in which communities of 'people', 'nation', and 'home' are free of external aggression. However, the equation that modern literature is equal to national literature cannot serve as the effective standard for Korean literature representing community any longer. This study examines the representative way of thinking of community after its end in the philosophical genealogy, including Levinas followed by Blanchot and Nancy. This study also introduces appearances of communities of the outsides in a few works published since the 2000's. The communities of the outside appearing in the works, of course, are coincidental, accidental, and rather temporary unlike the communities in modern terms. Nevertheless, the temporary attribute appears to be more suitable for the matter of 'community of literature'.