재현 주체의 위기와 자기의 발생: 1990년 김영현 논쟁 및 소설 재론

Abstract

This article revisits Kim Young-hyun’s novels, which are considered to be the origin of the literature of internality in the 1990s, and the controversy over his novels, focusing on the keywords of the position of the representational subject and the occurrence of self. This debate problematized the place of the interior in the transition from the late 1980s to the 1990s, in tandem with the desire of critics for a ‘new’ sense of the ‘literary’. What has not been discussed, however, is the specific ways in which internality is revealed through the novelistic device. By examining the debates over Kim Young-hyun and his major novels in 1990, a period known as the transition from the collective to the individual, from ‘we’ to ‘I’, this paper attempts to read his fiction not as the origin of newness or as a sign of disconnection, but as a site of possibility where the categories of collective and individual, object and subject, are them󰠀selves reconfigured. In particular, I argue that the complexity and instability of representation in Kim Young-hyun’s novels is linked to the problem of the self/I as a writing subject, and that this concept of “self” is distinct from the “individual” who expresses separation from the world. Kim’s narrator is a point of view(時點/視點) that includes the ‘I’ that occurs at the overlapping point of history and personal memories and the ‘I’ as the point where the gaze of the other and the subject intersect. It exposes the impossibility of reproducing the world from a transcendent point of view and captures the duality of the self as both the subject and the other who perceives that it. Kim Young-hyun’s novels need to be reexamined as they demonstrate strategies of self󰠀representation and writing that are not reducible to the confrontational framing of the debate over his novels or to the retroactive origins of the 1990s literature of internality. This article constitutes foundational work for a literary-historical reconstruction of the strategies of self-representation and mechanisms of narcissism in 1990s literature.