지각행위로서의 문학

Literature As an Act of Perception: Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenological Literary Theory

This study investigates a theory of literature envisioned by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a philosopher of phenomenology who succeeded and revised the basic ideas of Husserl's transcendental phenomenology. Although Merleau-Ponty can rarely be thought of as a theorist of literature, it is known that his philosophy has a lot to say something about art and literature. Actually, he tried to pursue his goal of theorizing the phenomenology of perception by way of a range of literary and artistic thematics. Thus, art and literature become an indispensable part of his philosophical considerations, a fact evinced by his own formulation that the task of philosophy cannot be separated from the task of literature. After briefly reviewing the key concepts of perception and body shown mainly in his magnum opus The Phenomenology of Perception, this study goes on to reveal the ways in which his theory of perception extends to the realm of art and literature. In so doing, this study is giving a special attention to Merleau-Ponty's idea of language which is formulated as a division between indirect language and algorithm. Finally, we will see the epistemological implications of the so-called his philosophy of ambiguity, an expression that is related to the nature of his phenomenology of perception as a negative confrontations of philosophy of reflection.