한국 현대시의 포스트모더니즘 아이러니 양상

Abstract

Jacques Derrida’s remark that ‘all speech is potentially ironic’ proves directly the reformation of irony in postmodernistic society. In this sense, a critical mind in this paper starts with a premise that the postmodernism itself is ‘irony.’ It has been difficult to find a literary approach to the postmodernistic irony and even a study of this irony with respect to Korean poetry. The theories of postmodernistic irony thus can be summarized to map a postmodernistic topography of Korean modern poetry. The postmodernistic irony founds itself on the linguistic instability and the literary negativity. It thus gears into the uncertainty of world on the basis of language. Concretely, it is realized in its entanglement with the play-on-words as excessive signifier, the non-representative images, the polyphonic voices, the parodic hybridity, the metonymic transference, the allegoric fragments, and the ethicality and politicality of the others. The cognitive attitudes and expressive modes of this irony can be classified into and examined under the items such as 1) ‘the non-representative signifier to metonymize the differance’ that illustrates irony from the non-representative and nonobjective referentiality of signifier with center in theories of Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man featuring the self-reproduction of divisional signifiers, 2) ‘the masochistic humor being restructured by the play-on-words’ that illustrates irony of the playfulness being denied and delayed by the linguistic operation on the basis of both Gilles Deleuze's humor and Richard Rorty's poetic irony, 3) ‘the parabasis as a fragmented allegory’ that illustrates irony as Paul de Man’s the rereading to be evoked by the epical fragments with their interventions in the denied truth and mythic traces, and 4) ‘the performativity of the others in destruction of the dichotomy’ that illustrates irony that goes with the performativity by destructing the dichotomous order with center in theories of Richard Rorty, Judith Butler, and Linda Hutcheon with emphasis on the microscopicalized political and ethical power. The texts of this paper are title poems of the recent works of Baek Eun-Seon, Kim Min-Jeong, Kim Hyeon, and Lim Sol-Aa.