Thinking Beyond Modernism: Peripheral Realism and the Ethics of Truth-Telling
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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by University of Minnesota Digital Conservancy Thinking Beyond Modernism: Peripheral Realism and the Ethics of Truth-Telling A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Hyeryung Hwang IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Timothy A. Brennan, Advisor June, 2017 © Hyeryung Hwang 2017 i Acknowledgements My project would not have been possible without the support of many. First of all, I would like to express the deepest appreciation to the members of my committee. My advisor, Timothy Brennan, to whom I am fully indebted as a researcher and teacher, has provided generous support and incisive feedback throughout every stage of this research project. The core of this project took shape through our conversations in our many seminars and meetings and developed under his tireless guidance. Brennan’s sense of commitment to his students is by and large unparalleled, and I am greatly fortunate to have been able to work with such an enthusiastic and dedicated mentor. Keya Ganguly has provided timely advice at every step of my graduate career and helped me widen my scholarly horizon. Her work has demonstrated how our scholarly work should always provide a quest for our times and has further inspired me to keep the political ethics of world literature in mind in developing the project. Her astonishing diligence, honesty, and realism also significantly helped me survive the last two years, including job placement and the dissertation defense. Siobhan Craig has provided much support for the comparative as well as philosophical aspects of my work. Her guidance goes back to my first days in graduate school, and her scholarly rigor and personal generosity allowed me to maintain confidence in my research throughout my graduate years. She is a model teacher, and I cannot thank her enough for making herself available whenever I needed her. Ellen Messer-Davidow, who graciously joined the committee late in the process, has been an incredible resource for my study of both Marxist criticism and affect theory. Her ii thoughtful critiques and productive comments have helped me refine my arguments, and her help was vital to the formation of this project. Countless others were extraordinarily helpful throughout the writing of this dissertation, and they have left their mark on it in various ways. John Pistelli provided a great deal of guidance from the very beginning, while challenging me to complicate my arguments for peripheral realism. He generously agreed to read every chapter and offered invaluable insight at a crucial moment in the development of the project. Jenna Sciuto, Leigh Anne Duck, and Auritro Majumder helped with my chapter on South Korean neo- realist cinema, allowing me to communicate my ideas to a large audience in a more thoughtful way. Thanks should go to my colleagues and dear friends Sunyoung Ahn, Eun-ha Na, and Narae-Kim as well. I have benefited enormously from their eagerness to listen to my project, as well as from their willingness to discuss their own work with me. I am also grateful to the members of the Theory Reading Group—Mike Rowe, Stephen McCulloch, Wes Burdine, and Robb St. Lawrence—who have proven to be exceptional interlocutors in the course of my graduate years. Special thanks to Andrew Marzoni and Joe Hughes, moreover, who generously supported my work by providing countless hours of their own time to share their ideas and review my applications for fellowships and grants. I also owe thanks to Rebecca Krug, Tony Brown, Ji-sook Park, Marla Zubel, Tim August, Robert Tally, Aaron Apps, Kate Johnston, Valerie Bherer, Jessica Apolloni, Bomi Yoon, Hyun-joo Shin, Hye-kyung Lee, and Rebeca Velasquez, who offered various forms of support and much needed encouragement. I consider myself incredibly privileged to have the support of such brilliant colleagues and friends. iii I would also like to acknowledge the support of the professors and staff of the Department of English, the College of Liberal Arts, and the Graduate School at the University of Minnesota. They offered financial support at times in the form of scholarships and travel grants to conferences, including the Graduate Research Partnership Project Fellowship (Summer 2014), Short-term Research Grant (Summer 2015), and the Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship (2015-2016). Many thanks are due to Professor Yong-gyu Kim and Hwa-young Yoon at Pusan National University, and to my parents and parents-in-law. They never ceased to believe in my potential, and without their continuous support, both material and emotional, it would not have been possible for me to complete this project. And finally, words are not enough to express my profound gratitude to my husband, Dongho Cha, to whom I dedicate this dissertation. His love, generosity, intelligence, and patience have kept my faith in humanism. He teaches me every day by merely existing, and I feel extremely fortunate to continue my intellectual journey with him. iv Dedication To Cha v Abstract Thinking Beyond Modernism: Peripheral Realism and the Ethics of Truth-Telling explores how various forms of peripheral realism—an aesthetic that is hugely underappreciated not just in the Western academy but also in postcolonial studies— envision a new cultural analysis that allows us to understand and surpass the limits of modernism. First, I probe how modernist taste, with its ahistorical emphasis on aesthetic form and subjectivity, had far-reaching global influence at the expense of what it systematically jettisoned—that is, various realist attempts to reimagine the social value of literature. I analyze the demands of Western modernist aesthetics and its influence in the making of world literature and cinema to show how peripheral forms of art resist the modernist imperative. Second, I discuss recent instances in which realism re-appears as a problem—its status after the affective turn in literary cultural theory, its advent in the peripheral vision of the metropolitan writer J. M. Coetzee’s Australian Trilogy, and its emergence as a peculiar from of “neo-realism” in literary and cinematic works from South America and South Korea—to demonstrate how authors reclaim an entirely new type of realism. De-emphasizing modernist delight in the wiles of language and skepticism about representations’ correspondence to the real, neo-realists rediscover historical agents’ ability to express their subjectivity in literary form without neglecting their own place in history. Finally, in addition to its broad geographical and political remit, the dissertation is, importantly, a study of genre. By investigating how peripheral neo-realists defend truthfulness and achieve a sober realism that understands the ethical vi dimension of political life as essentially collective, I argue that realism’s “fidelity to truth” is not merely an epistemological claim but an ethical attitude toward the world. vii Table of Contents Acknowledgements i Dedication iv Abstract v I. Introduction 1 I.1. World Literature Now and the Literary World System 1 I.2. Revisiting the Realism-Modernism Debate 10 Georg Lukács and the Dialectic of Form and Content 11 Theodor Adorno and the Autonomy of Art 18 Fredric Jameson and an Aesthetics of Failure 24 Modernism and Beyond: Raymond Williams and Edward W. Said 30 I.3. Outline of the Dissertation 35 II. World Literature and the Place of Realism 38 II.1. Peripheral Realism and Its Discontents 38 II.2. J. M. Coetzee and the Realism of Embodiment 47 III. After Magic: The Emergence of Latin American Narco-Realism 69 III.1. No More Magic: Against Exhaustion 69 III.2. Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s The Sound of Things Falling 82 and the New Historical Novel IV. Between the Core and the Periphery: Semi-peripheral Neo-realist Cinema 100 and Ethics after Modernism IV.1. The Nation In-Between and the Dilemma of Semi-Peripheral Aesthetics 100 viii IV.2. South Korean Neo-realist Cinema and Chang-Dong Lee’s Poetry 108 V. Deleuze, Affect Theory, and the Future of Realism 130 Affect, Deleuze and the Problem of Representation 132 The Precarious Logic of Pure Affect and Secular Self 136 Deleuzian Lyrical Dialectics? 143 Against the Ontologization of Politics 149 Bibliography of Works Cited 156 1 I. INTRODUCTION I.1. World Literature Now and the Literary World System On the 16th of May 2016, the South Korean author Han Kang’s novel, The Vegetarian (2007), won the Man Booker International Prize, the first time a South Korean novel had ever done so. Soon after the news of this award, the novel which had only been read within small circles of the South Korean literati, suddenly became a national best-seller, and a flood of interviews with the author likewise followed. It did not take long, however, for the congratulatory mood of the Korean reading public to turn to general confusion, leading them to wonder: is there anything “Korean” about the novel except the ostensible fact that it was written by a Korean author about a Korean woman? The important inquiry reignited the long-held, uncomfortable debate on the national desire to be recognized by the West; the self-mocking Korean jokes, “Do you know Kimchi?” and “Do you know Ji-Sung Park?”—which used to be asked of foreigners from Europe and North America, in particular—evinced both how earnest South Koreans have been about promoting themselves to gain cultural visibility, and how exhausted they were with the struggle for recognition at the same time. While most think the jokes are now chiefly uttered with irony, to indicate a phase of Koreans’ critical self-reflection—or even to humiliate themselves for their unrequited desire for acknowledgement—others are still hopeful that the inclusion of Han Kang’s name on the best-seller list will heighten the culture’s international status.