When paying attention to the possibility of intrinsic expansion of literature, modern novels in Korea and criticism of them have a problematic characteristic of seeing literature as a reflection of society and systems. Therefore, the purpose of this p...
When paying attention to the possibility of intrinsic expansion of literature, modern novels in Korea and criticism of them have a problematic characteristic of seeing literature as a reflection of society and systems. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to examine the method of criticism that makes a novel an active thought.
The discussion, which was the main reference point in establishing the methodology of this paper, is a study to understand the nature of the poetry image through affect. The view that the image is not a reflection of reality, but a space where affective fluctuations occur makes the poetic text an active thought. Therefore, this paper attempted to transform the research methodology of 'Poetry-Image-Affect' into 'Novel-Mimesis-Affect'. The introduction of the concept of Mimesis instead of images is an attempt to reach the purpose of this paper more thoroughly. Literary criticism that focuses on affect is likely to make the error of failing to grasp the inner motility of literature by interpreting the content of the text as a reflection of affect. Therefore, to pay attention to this, this paper emphasizes the power generated in the process of constructing the narrative through the concept of Mimesis. The reason why the concept of image was not used is that this paper wanted to have a discussion that was not limited to ideological novels. In addition, unlike poems characterized by self-referentiality, novels are considered to have the logic of the real world. So a new concept is required to be wary of the logic of reflection.
Chapter 2 of this paper reviews the concept of affect and analyzes its politics in order to establish the reason for reading literature by paying attention to affect. The concept of affect originates from the idea of Spinoza, which saw that it was the body, not the awareness, that open the world. Deleuze borrows it, placing an important meaning on the process of body transformation itself. This view deviates from teleological thinking that presupposes transcendental essence by affirming the movement that occurs between the bodies as the capacity of existence. Therefore the perspective that emphasizes the reality inherent in affect about art does not make the work a representation of something, but rather makes it construct meaning by exercising itself. This is the politics of affect, which expands the possibility of existence through attention to the creation process, and this becomes the meaning of reading literature with the lens of affect.
Chapter 3 analyzes the concept of Mimesis to understand the relationship between affect and Mimesis. Aristotle, who emphasized the active productivity of Mimesis, shows that it is not a reproduction of a given reality, but a task of creating a fiction. Since then, in the context of postmodernism, Mimesis has been newly noted as a overcome of modern human-centered thinking. In this context, Mimesis is defined as the concept of reaching things which is before awareness by approaching the object through perception. From this, this paper saw that affective fluctuation is involved in the process of Mimesis. Furthermore, when paying attention to the relationship between the two concepts, it was found that Mimesis' physicality could be expanded to creativity. Regarding the effect of Mimesis, Benjamin and Ricoeur's discussion shows that the self grows by accepting otherness and reflecting on its potentia through the process of Mimesis. This leads to the politics that retains numerous possibilities before realization and fully realizes the possibility of existence by paying attention to physical encounters. Reading literature through affect is to actively sense this motility before the process of signifying. And in this context, Mimesis functions as a place where the intrinsic power of creation is ejected from the narrative composition process itself, making the novel a real thought. Furthermore, the perspective of paying attention to Mimesis' active capacity in the composition of the narrative finds the essence of the novel in the desire of the statement, thereby proving the power of the novel to reach reality.
Based on the review that Mimesis is a space where affective fluctuation occurs in novels, Chapter 4 attempts to read the novel as an internal reality through the analysis of Kim Seung-ok's works. When paying attention to the unconscious composition process of the narrative, 「생명연습」 reveals that the subjective boundaries between characters and the distinction of time are confused. This is a representation through things which is before awareness, and thus the inner side of the speaker who neglect value judgment is embodied in the narrative composition itself. In the analysis of 「다산성」, this paper tried to overcome the typical understanding of seeing affective fluctuation as a stop of meaning. The three passages that make up this novel are presented disconnected, and thus giving off the atmosphere of the loss of vitality instead of producing verbal explanation. In this way, the perspective that pays attention to the motility of representation makes the novel not about something, but about itself, so that the reader can enrich the novel's capabilities by creating new questions instead of finding the answer in the novel.