‘새로움’으로서의 근대성 (Modernity as ‘Novelty’)

서지정보

· 발행기관 : 영미문학연구회
· 수록지 정보 : 영미문학연구 / 26호 / 135 ~ 156페이지
· 저자명 : 황정아

초록

As the conceptual history of ‘modern’ shows, what characterizes historical semantics of the ‘modern period’ is a tension between being simply another new period and being the new period. The discursive configuration of ‘modernity’ has also been more or less affected by this tension, and discourses of modernity that subscribe to the value of newness may provide a vantage point to overview issues and problems regarding the concept of modernity. This paper takes Marshall Berman’s idea of modernity as an exemplar and investigates what is omitted and denied in it. Berman defines modernity as an endless repetition of novelty, referring to Marx’s famous statement, ‘all that is solid melts into air.’ His notion of modernity, however, cannot take into account the fact that modern development, either spiritual or material, has constitutive limits. Moreover, certain ‘solid’ things from the pre-modern period, or ‘the already there’, do persist as part of modernity and sometimes enjoy a hegemonic status. Modernity as novelty foregrounds the dichotomy of the new as viable vs. the old as residual, and thus restrains more important questions as to which elements in the modern period serve to justify the dominant logic of modernity and which maintain heterogeneity as resource for another historical possibility.

영어초록

As the conceptual history of ‘modern’ shows, what characterizes historical semantics of the ‘modern period’ is a tension between being simply another new period and being the new period. The discursive configuration of ‘modernity’ has also been more or less affected by this tension, and discourses of modernity that subscribe to the value of newness may provide a vantage point to overview issues and problems regarding the concept of modernity. This paper takes Marshall Berman’s idea of modernity as an exemplar and investigates what is omitted and denied in it. Berman defines modernity as an endless repetition of novelty, referring to Marx’s famous statement, ‘all that is solid melts into air.’ His notion of modernity, however, cannot take into account the fact that modern development, either spiritual or material, has constitutive limits. Moreover, certain ‘solid’ things from the pre-modern period, or ‘the already there’, do persist as part of modernity and sometimes enjoy a hegemonic status. Modernity as novelty foregrounds the dichotomy of the new as viable vs. the old as residual, and thus restrains more important questions as to which elements in the modern period serve to justify the dominant logic of modernity and which maintain heterogeneity as resource for another historical possibility.

참고자료

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