문학의 경제, 선물의 경제

Literary Economy and Gift Economy

A common assumption, "literature is a gift", has been repeated over and over again within the innumerable definitions on literature, Sayings such as, "Literature is only created by the gifted", or "Literature is the best gift offered by the writer to the readers", are cases in point When describing literature as a gift, the fundamental purpose of doing so is not to define literature as a gift but rather to differentiate literature from what is not a gift It is because the meaning of a gift is founded on the deep-rooted opposition between gift and commodity, Such arguments can be said to be related with issues concerning the autonomy of literature or culture. However, what the thesis attempts to analyze is not the autonomous value of literature or culture, but the significance of the phenomenon whereby literature comes to interact with what is not literature in order to 'make itself as literature'. To be precise, reflecting on the assumption that 'literature is a gift' entails not the return to aesthetic essentialism, but a critical approach to the relationship between literature and economy. The thesis shall discuss various arguments on the gift as considered in "New Economic Criticism" and Jacques Oerrida's Given Time, and to review how literature is being redefined amidst such discussions. As already mentioned above, if literature as a gift entails opposition and strain with the existing economic order, then this could be an attempt to reveal the critical value of literature. Furthermore, this may offer an opportunity to review the politico-economic significances of studies on literature in the sense that political economy is a criticism of the existing understanding on economics, and a study of the social relations and their history constructed on the circulation of things.