역사와 문학의 시간: 역사철학과 포스트모던 역사담론 그리고 유토피아

History and Time of Literature: Philosophy of History, Postmodern Historiography, and Utopia

Time as an essential factor of making the setting of literature eventually leads to the idea of history since history in general has been regarded as a lineal flow or multilateral accumulation of time itself. For understanding productively the time in literature, this essay attempts to overcome the oppositional view of history between the traditional philosophy of history represented by Hegel and the postmodern discourse of historiography such as M. Foucault and G. Deleuze. Although the former sees history as a teleological progress of homogeneous time and the latter considers it as a contingent transformation of fragmented heterogenous time, the vision of utopia could offer a common ground for mediating their contending views of history. In relation to this, this essay argues that W. Benjamin’s utopian discourse of time and history should synthesize the Hegelian philosophy of history and the postmodern historiography of Foucault and Deleuze in a dialectical way because Benjamin’s angel of history, which sees history as “one single catastrophe” of fragmented piles of time, overcomes totalistic teleology and nihilistic fragmented contingency by the dialectical image of Utopia. In this respect, Benjamin’s view of time and history could extend the time of literature from teleological progress into heterogenous and contingent coexistence of the past and the present with utopian inspiration.