근대성의 판타지아 — 1990년대 한국문학의 근대성 담론 —

Abstract

The historic self-consciousness and self-narrative of the 1990s, which revolved around the sense of ‘break,’ owed much to the concept, or metaphor, of modernity. This paper examines the narrative and affective construction of modernity discourses in Korean Literature of the 1990s together with epistemic and socio-historical break which they prompted. The emergence of modernity discourses during the decade has largely been explained in terms of the response to the trend of postmodernism and the collapse of the socialist bloc, but absent any necessary link between these two developments and the focus on modernity, it seems that the discourses arose as a product of ideological choice. The trope of modernity, once established, enabled the discourses to sustain the idea of technological and industrial development underlying modernization and also to appropriate the postmodern critique of the modern, while effectively circumventing all attacks, both of modernization and of postmodernism. The discourses present a vastly augmented version of ‘modernity’ resembling a kind of perpetual motion machine, which attempts to rewrite and displace the prevailing narratives on how to go beyond the modern. Despite starting by declaring and lamenting the impossibility of revolution, the discourses mutate into allowing the possibility of modernity, which is then presumably capable of criticizing and even negating itself. Ultimately then, the impossibility thus repressed and turned into a possibility inevitably returns. In these discourses, modernity’s capacity for self-criticism and self-negation ultimately converge into aesthetic modernity, or literary modernism: howsoever thorough modernist criticisms may be, they merely amount to a specific self-referential performance of modernity. The ‘outside’ of modernity is something to be practiced, not just to be discovered, and the practice of overcoming modernity can only begin by accepting, once and for all, that it is impossible for modernity to truly negate itself.