공동체의 장소 상상의 공동체: 마리오 가르시아 토레스 <<당신은 눈을 본 적이 있나요?>> 박솔뫼 「을」, 배수아 「북쪽 거실」

Abstract

This paper aims to describe and discuss the aspects of the community-topos in the contemporary literary and visual texts. The Inquiry begins from the question about the (im)possibility of the community in the present world. ‘Community’ has the utopian image in the recent society, since many individuals have difficulties to make communities in solidarity. Answering this question, the contemporary literature and arts are depicting the quite impressive landscapes of <sites of community> and <communities of imagination>, which let us think about the possibilities of the new community: Mario Garcia Torres' audiovisual essay Have You Ever Seen the Snow?(2010) searches for the documents of an old hotel in Kabul, Afghanistan, where foreign artists stayed in 1970s; Bak Solmay's novel Eul (2010) presents a small hotel in the (unknown) foreign country, where young long-term travelers stay, and Bae Suah's novel Northern Livingroom (2009) tells the story of a camp, where the people lead lives of voluntary isolation, and dreams also of the (possible) communicative community through the second-hand picture postcards. These ‘pictures’ of the communities in the ‘textual spaces’ are making ‘the sensible fabric' for the <communities of imagination>;the community which is not the community, the community for the outsiders or the minorities, who make the new communities in ‘other spaces’ and protest through that. This community-topos is, like ‘mirror’, heterotopia and utopia at the same time. Literature and Arts themselves can be considered as <sites of community>, where <communities of imagination> can exist. Jean-Luc Nancy's La Communauté désoeuvrée and Michel Foucault's〝Of Other Spaces" amongst others give good references for the study on community-topos in the contemporary literature and arts. Somewhere between place and placelessness, the <sites of communities> are placed, and there live <communities of imagination>.