20세기 초반의 미국과 21세기 초반의 미국

Abstract

In the early 20th century D. H. Lawrence says, in Studies in Classic American Literature, “America is a great melting pot.” America is “away from everything. That's why most people have come to America, and still do come. To get away from everything they are and have been.” In this respect Lawrence finds out “the spirit of place” different from European modern thoughts in the classic American literature including Benjamin Franklin, Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman and so on. But in the early 21st century Peter Weir, an Australian cinema director, shows the flight of Truman Burbank in ‘The Truman Show’ from the Seahaven Island Township which is symbolized as “the only world” in the Americanized post-modern world. As Lawrence finds out the American “spirit of place”, we think of American people as a different way of life from European modern thoughts. But after World War II America has been liked to the modern European way of life. After all, Truman doubts his world and escapes through the danger of death from the Seahaven Island which was “all he'd ever known and as real to him as ours is to us.” Comparing to Peter Weir, John M. Coetzee is, in Elizabeth Costello, going one step forward the trans-modern figure who is an Australian female writer, Elizabeth Costello. She is “a writer, born in 1928”, who has “left behind the territory” in which the modern white European were. And she is a person who lives “in the far territory”, where Lawrence finds out “the spirit of place” in the old classic American literary texts. But most Americans don't understand her world and will not appreciate on her way of life. So we have to try find out “the spirit of place”, in which Lawrence thought of America as the different way of life from the modern European thoughts, not in America but in the present Australian and South African white writers.