텍스트의 세속성과 정치성 - Said, Jameson, Eagleton을 중심으로

A Study of Textual Secularity and Politics

  This essay proposes to give a detailed analysis of the newly envisioned meaning of text and textuality with a comparative investigation into such singular theorists as Jameson, Eagleton and Said who have been respectively explicating this issue of textuality in a hot battle ground of modern critical discourse. Despite of some significant and analysis-deserved theoretical differences among them, these theorists share a common ground on their dissatisfaction with and critique of the cliched notion of modern text and textuality based on the unfounded binary opposition of textual content and form, text and reality, text and secularity, and so on. As Jameson has convincingly argued, we never confront a text immediately and "purely", since texts come before us as the always-already read. In consequence, we should be carefully wary of the sedimented layers of previous interpretations. This makes the starting point for Jameson"s "dialectical criticism" which problematizes both the locus of textual subject and object. Eagleton takes a similar stance to Jameson in his problematization of the unquestioned implication of textuality and literariness. Nevertheless, Eagleton goes further in his radical gesture of de constructing the demarcating line of text and non-text. He attempts to shake the fundamental but unquestioned ground of our reading and interpretation of a given text with some noticeable (de)merits. Said"s notion of secular criticism may be summed up a singular and convincing inclusion of both Jameson"s and Eagleton"s elaboration on the meaning of textuality. Said does not hesitate to demonstrate his deep discomfort with the "text-in-itself detached from its context which is, both in reality and in principle, inseparably intertwined with the context which does claim its space in and out of the text. The interpretative practice and the identity of text is, following Said, supposed to pay a careful attention to the horizon of secularity of a given text.