세월호 이후의 시와 ‘재현-윤리’

Abstract

This study aims to identify the response of literature, especially poetry, to the event called the ‘Sewol ferry’, by examining the appearance of ‘ethics of representation’ in poetry after Sewol ferry. Several issues arise in front of the topic of the theme of How to ‘represent’ a catastrophic ‘event’. As the necessity and validity of representation became the main agenda of the discourse, the ‘Unrepresentability’ of the poem became a hot topic of interest. However, there is also a ‘conventional’ form of representation found in poems after Sewol ferry. There has been no research that asked how they are appearing, so this article would like to talk about other impulses hidden under the signifier of ‘literary representation’. The term that encompasses these principles is ethics of representation. In order to explain this, it is necessary to examine both the socio-historical background of Sewol ferry, ‘neoliberalism’ as a possible state of disaster, and the discursive situation of the Korean literary scene as a manifestation of this. It is worth noting that there is a social and literary history in the context that made the political power of representation possible. Second, this study also draws attention to the relationship between the Sewol ferry and the events of May 18, April 19, etc. What recurs in the Sewol ferry incident may be the ‘revolution’ of previous periods. In this moment, representation is appropriated politically. The driving force behind this comes from the form of ‘Lyric’. In the identification of the self, poetry can imagine the ‘repetition’ of liberal democracy rather than the ‘movement’ of democratization. Finally, we look at poems that are ‘different’ from those that ‘replay’ Sewol ferry in a performative way. These poems attempt to speak to the reality of Sewol ferry, while removing lyrical perspective. However, as long as they are mediated by language, it is difficult to avoid the risk of editing the real. At this point, we realize that experimentation with representational forms is an act of exploring the ethics of representation, and that the reality of Sewol ferry is only told when ethical risks are taken. This study suggests the need to investigate the discipline of (mythical) representation. At this time, the ‘seemingly constant’ path between the (Sewol ferry) event and the representation may be deviated, and a starting point for the event to be ‘more talked about’ will be created.