영어권 문학 읽기 : 탈식민 텍스트와 윤리적 개별성

Reading Postcolonial Literary Texts : Ethical Singularity between Socio - Historicity and Aesthetic Particularity

Postcolonial theories played a pivotal role in the selection and introduction of Postcolonial literary texts. Arguably the year of 1985 witnessed the practical grounds for such a move with the publication of three seminal essays: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's "Three Women's Texts and Critiques of Imperialism," Homi Bhabha's "Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree outside Dehli, May 1817," and Edward Said's "Orientalism Reconsidered." Spivak and Bhabha's essays, in particular, offered us the representative examples of Postcolonial novels such as Jean Rhys's and V. S. Naipaul's. In other following essays, Spivak extended the list by reading R. K. Narayan's The Guide and Mahasweta Devi's important short stories, and further articulated the critical frame of reading those texts. Spivak's discussion of Devi's two stories, "Douloti the Bountiful" and "Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha," best exemplifies her articulate reading of Postcolonial texts. Her discussion focuses on the "secret encounter" with the socio-culturally different other, and calls for an "(im)possible ethical relation" between (so-called) us and them. Termed the "ethical singularity," it takes pains to do justice on cultural phenomena on their own terms. Despite its concern with the aesthetic particularity, of course, it does not exclude the importance of socio-political sphere. Spivak reiterates this ethical responsibility-in-singularity is not an issue of alternative choice between aesthetic particularity and socio-political historicity. Surmounting the aporia of binary opposition, Spivak's reading differentiates and redraws the boundary of literariness in literary works. According to Spivak, "Literary reading teaches us to learn from the singular and the unverifiable." This is particularly or at least equally true for the Postcolonial literatures. As Puran, one of the heroes in Devi's story, reaches his new resolution at the end of the story, readers are required to address both socio-historical context and aesthetic singularity at the same time and the same weight. In the current milieu of New Historical, Cultural, and Postcolonial Studies, this means a plea for a revisionary justification of the singular, authentic, and aesthetic territory of literature in general.