實在의 美學化 : The Marble Faun에 나타난 포스트모더니즘 Postmodernism in The Marble Faun = The Aestheticization of Reality

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

An approach to Hawthorne's The Marble Faun in the context of Postmodernism includes the thesis that Hawthorne and Postmodernists share a notion of the aestheticization of Reality, by which I mean the poetics which privileges aesthetic modes over those of logic or reason and establishes the role of the aesthetic in shaping an existence, or Reality whose metaphysical foundations seem on the verge of imminent collapse.
I begin by challenging the usual approach to find the truth or Reality of the text in its underlying unity or totality-I am interested in showing how the story, in radically ironic ways, goes about making the very idea of Reality problematic, consistently undermining any argument for its unity and self-presence. Defined as inscrutable (indeterminate) Being, this postmodern Reality posits the unstable epistemological and ontological grounds of The Marble Faun.
Hawthorne in The Marble Faun demonstrates his "postmodern" poetics that Reality (i.e. "the truth of the human heart") cannot be grasped by any metaphysical research but it can be approached only by the multiple aesthetic images inherent in it. This fundamental sense of the aesthetic as a form of knowing and presenting is thus both an epistemology and an ontology transfigured in his poetics of the romance.
The aesthetic transformation of Reality in The Marble Faun specifically manifests itself in the major characters of the romance -Donatello, Miriam, Hilda, Kenyon, and "the model" (Brother Antonio) "three" of whom "were artists, or connected with art." In fact, the precise identities of the major characters as well as story lines remain obscure to the reader except through their multiple aesthetic images; human creations and human beings themselves are all re-creations of artistic metamorphosis through Hawthorne's poetics of multiplicity."
The Marble Faun, Hawthorne's last completed romance, "a neutral territory," where the actual and the imaginary may mingle, finds its equivalent genre in postmodern poetics, for the latter tries to break down the walls between actualities and literary fantasies, with the element of self-reflexive metafictionality. Hawthorne in the romance and postmodernists here agree in their revolt against the "installed" realism and representation, and in their "subversive" assumptions that language is to be essentially rhetorical rather than representational or expressive of referential, unitary meaning.
The notion that reference in poetics has been entirely problematized by Hawthorne and postmodernists testifies the aestheticization of indeterminate Reality, and that justifies The Marble Faun as a postmodern novel as well.