잘려진 손가락

임경규 심미안 2013 문학들 Vol.- No.33

할리우드 재난영화와 미국적 이데올로기 그리고 <클로버필드>의 장르 전복

임경규 한국동서비교문학학회 2022 동서 비교문학저널 Vol.- No.59

This essay has twin foci. First, it reviews some of the 2000’s disaster movies—particularly, Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men (2006) and Francis Lawrence’s I am Legend (2007) along with a 1988’s hit movie Die Hard—from the perspective of American cultural archetype moulded and developed by Ralph Waldo Emerson and later R.W.B. Lewis. Then it argues that all the Hollywood disaster movies are likely to reinforce American ideologies such as American dream and American exceptionalism by repeating and recreating American founding myth. Such a reading would possibly provide a new perspective through which we can read Hollywood disaster films prevailing these days after the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic. Second, this essay demonstrates how Matt Reeves’s 2008 film Cloverfield revises the codes and conventions of those Hollywood disaster movies through a strategic use of subjective camera. Its peculiar use of first-person camera not only effectively debunks the metaphysical center of the film hallucinatorily created by third-person omniscient viewpoint; it also strips white male heroes—especially, father figures as saviors of the world from disasters—of American cultural authority. Furthermore, the film’s telling representation of unlimited and relentless violence that exceeds the subjective camera angle makes it difficult to imagine what the post-disaster America would be like. In this sense, Cloverfield expands the ideological and political possibility of the disaster genre, although we could hardly say that the film is an outright avant-garde film that provides a new vision about disasters and America.

포스트모던 브리콜뢰르 - 21세기 미국 시에 대한 단상

임경규 심미안 2010 문학들 Vol.- No.22

“본질”과 “허상”의 갈림길에서 : 문화분석 범주로서의 “인종”의 유용성

임경규 21세기영어영문학회 2007 21세기영어영문학회 학술대회 Vol.2007 No.1

프레드릭 제임슨의 『포스트모더니즘』의 현재적 가치: 유토피아적 사유의 복원을 위하여

임경규 동국대학교 영어권문화연구소 2021 영어권문화연구 Vol.14 No.1

This essay aims at questioning on the present significance of Fredric Jameson’s 1991 book, Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism with the forthcoming publication of its Korean translation. When the homonymous essay was first published in 1984, it immediately spawned both the loudest applauses and the harshest critiques. Yet it made innumerable contributions to our understanding of postmodernism: it successfully articulated the postmodernism with the so-called late capitalism; it provided a concrete foothold upon which we could read the post-1960s’ American culture from a political economic perspective. Particularly, the “cognitive mapping” it suggested as a new spatial political aesthetics taught us how to struggle with the late capitalism that effectively transcends our ability to cognitively map our surroundings. As a translator, however, I would like to ask why we should read this book ‘here and now,’ more than 30 years later after its first publication. What kind of problematics could it address in our 21st-century climate? Finally I will argue that what we should restore from this book and Jameson is the very Utopian thinking, the very aspiration for social change.

벌거벗은 생명으로서의 아시아계 미국인:남 리의 『더 보트』와 정체성 정치의 한계

임경규 강원대학교 인문과학연구소 2018 인문과학연구 Vol.0 No.59

본 연구는 베트남계 호주-미국인 작가 남 리(Nam Le)의 데뷔작 더보트 를 전통적인 아시아계 미국문학의 정체성 정치를 뛰어넘는 새로운 정치에 대한 요청으로 해석한다. 이를 위하여 본 논문에서는 남 리의 텍스트를 이탈리아철학자 조르조 아감벤의 “벌거벗은 생명”의 관점에서 해석한다. 전통적인 아시아계 미국문학의 정체성 정치는 국내 문제와 국제 문제 사이에 허구적 경계선을 설정하고, 미국 국경선 내에서의 시민권 확장을 위하여 투쟁해왔다. 그러나 이는 아시아계 미국인의 구성적 타자를 생산할 수밖에 없었다. 여러 이유로자신의 고국을 탈출했으나 아직 새로운 집에 도착하지 못한 채 항구적으로국가적 경계선 밖으로 밀려난 사람들의 경험을 아시아계 미국인의 경험에서제외시켰던 것이다. 국가의 법률 체계 내에 포함되지 못한 이러한 사람들을우리는 ‘난민’이라 부른다. 남 리의 더 보트는 이런 난민의 눈으로 아시아계미국문학을 읽으며, 그들의 국가 상실 경험이 아시아계 미국문학의 규범적 언어를 넘어설 뿐만 아니라 정체성 정치의 한계를 폭로함을 보여준다. 남 리는아시아계 미국문학이 처해 있는 이런 한계 상황을 넘어서기 위해 새로운 스타일과 새로운 언어를 창안하려 시도하며, 일상의 규범적 언어가 포착하지 못하는 난민의 경험을 통해 새로운 정치학의 가능성을 타진한다. 본 연구는 바로이러한 시도들이 어떤 방식으로 이루어지는가에 대한 탐색이다. The purpose of this study is to interpret the Vietnamese Australian-American writer Nam Le’s The Boat as a call for a new politics that effectively transcends the traditional Asian American literature’s identity politics, by reading it from the perspective of Giorgio Agamben’s bio-politics. Traditional Asian American identity politics tends to draw a fictional line between the national and the international and to focus on so-called “claiming America” within the US national boundary. Such a tendency, however, cannot help producing the constitutive outside of Asian America —those who have to leave their own country for various reasons but have not yet arrived at a new home. Namely, the stateless or the refugees. Nam Le’s The Boat criticizes American ethnic literature through the eyes of Vietnamese refugees or so-called the boat people. Their experiences of statelessness not only goes beyond the normative language of traditional Asian American literature, but also effectively exposes the limitation of its identity politics. In order to escape from this literary and political deadlock, Le attempts to create a new style and a new language, one that could bear witness to the experiences of the boat people and enable us to imagine a new politics. This paper would examine how this could be possible by examining the boat people’s experience through Agamben’s concept of “bare life” as an object of bio-politics of modern nation-states.

향수영화와 5·18의 기억: 1980년 광주를 어떻게 기억해야 하는가?

임경규 한국동서비교문학학회 2023 동서 비교문학저널 Vol.- No.66

As more than 40 years have passed since the Gwangju Democratization Movement, the generation that directly experienced the May 18th events is gradually fading away, and an unexperienced generation has become the mainstream. Marianne Hirsch, a Holocaust scholar, argues that the unexperienced generation can also ethically mourn tragic historical events through cultural products like photographs by suggesting the concept of “Post-Memory.” However, this paper aims to point out the conceptual ambiguity and the risks of commodification associated with Post-Memory. In doing so, it introduces the concept of “Pre-Memory,” proposed by Guy Beiner, as a way of remembering and mourning tragic national events like the May 18th. To do this, the paper analyzes three 5.18 films (documentary film Kim-Gun directed by Kang Sang-woo, A Taxi Driver directed by Jang Hoon, and 1987: When the Day Comes directed by Jang Joon-hwan), drawing on Siegfried Kracauer’s study of ‘photographs’ and Frederic Jameson’s research on postmodern “nostalgia films.” These three films, produced by the Post-Memory generation, reproduce the May 18th through commercial narratives while tracking the truth of the past events. However, they commodify and reify the memory of the 5.18 only to reiterate the grammar of postmodern nostalgia films. Nevertheless, this paper suggests that these three films provide a framework for remembering the May 18th in a different way, connecting it with the concept of “Pre-Memory.”

화이트 디아스포라 vs. 네이티브 디아스포라 : 디아스포라 담론에 대한 비판적 고찰

임경규 21세기영어영문학회 2012 21세기영어영문학회 학술대회 Vol.2012 No.09

디아스포라의 그늘: 제시카 하게돈의 『개를 먹는 사람들』에 대한 한 가지 독해

임경규 현대영미어문학회 2013 현대영미어문학 Vol.31 No.3

This paper will read Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters in terms of the exploitation of the native by multiple-passport holders, or Aihwa Ong calls "flexible citizens," in the era of global Empire. This reading will illuminate the seamy side of politico-economic globalization and the proliferation of discourses and practices of diaspora, which causes the social division between diasporic and nondiasporic classes. By doing so, first, this paper will show that diasporic practices are not always liberatory, especially when they are articulated with the discourse of imperialism. Second, I will attempt to conceive of the “mobile” native moving beyond the imperial-diasporic network of Empire. That is to say, nondiasporic natives refuse to remain passive victims of the globalization; they are “recalcitrant” subjects--or what I would call “native diaspora”--who moves against the grain of transnational capitalism.

The Symbolic Restoration of Human Labor: Duchamp's Readymades

임경규 한국제임스조이스학회 2009 제임스조이스저널 Vol.15 No.1

Marcel Duchamp and his art have been discussed within the framework of art versus anti-art. What is problematic in this framework is that it is unable to illuminate the political aspect of Duchamp’s art in conjunction with the dominant social structure such as capitalism. This study, therefore, approaches Duchamp’s art, particularly, readymades, from a Marxist perspective and explicates its political potential. Here I would suggest that Duchamp’s readymades directly address the central contradictions of emerging bourgeois capitalism, that is, reification and consequent alienation of human labor. My conclusion is that Duchamp’s readymades provide a site in which human labor is restored in a symbolic way.