SF와 판타지를 넘어—차펙, 랑 그리고 비밀의 문제 (Beyond SF and Fantasy —Čapek, Lang and the Question of Secret)

서지정보

· 발행기관 : 문학과영상학회
· 수록지 정보 : 문학과 영상 / 10권 / 1호 / 33 ~ 54페이지
· 저자명 : 김석

초록

Two of today’s most popular literary/filmic genres, science fiction and fantasy trace their origin back to the late nineteenth-century Europe, where the intensification of industrialization and its manifold social reverberations spilled over into cultural spheres, thus giving rise to all sorts of generic mutations and transformation hitherto unimaginable under duress of the stratified categories of given conventional art genres. Though often berated among liberal-minded critics as an inferior genre catering to retrogressive ideologies, fantasy, just as much its more politically-correct twin SF, has in recent times gained no less formidable following, serving as an equally symptomatic testament to the mass yearnings for a new form of society alternative to the one presented by late capitalism.
Karel Čapek’s two well-known SF (or scientific fantasy) plays Rossum’s Universal Robots (1920) and The Makropolus Case (1922) and Fritz Lang’s sci-fi classic Metropolis (1927) are path-breaking contemporaneous works, which have long enjoyed both popular and critical acclaim in their respective realms of literature and film. The reason which draws our attention to these classic texts today, however, is not merely due to their historical interest. For not only do these works bring to view the singular geopolitical conditions (of the early twentieth-century Czechoslovakia and Germany) that produced such uncompromising texts but preserve, in nigh archetypical forms, the vital energies that propelled the post-First World War generation to sketch an outline of alternative route to future. More significant still are the particular manners in which the given works thematize the concept secret: Čapek by taking full advantage of the linguistic medium of dramatic dialogue while at the same time pushing the sociological ramification of Gestus (in its widest sense conceived by Bertolt Brecht) to its limit and Lang by making his film self-reflective of the unrealized potentialities of the new medium.
How are we to do justice to these creative legacies? The answer lies, no doubt, in rigorously probing the singular geopolitcal condition in which we find ourselves sandwiched in between the twin towering traditions of East Asia and European West. But as with Čapek and Lang, we must at the same time carefully examine the surging energies that galvanize the current popular culture, which not only testifies to the undying effects of globalization but no less significantly harks back to the traumas of our initial contact with the Western modernity.

영어초록

Two of today’s most popular literary/filmic genres, science fiction and fantasy trace their origin back to the late nineteenth-century Europe, where the intensification of industrialization and its manifold social reverberations spilled over into cultural spheres, thus giving rise to all sorts of generic mutations and transformation hitherto unimaginable under duress of the stratified categories of given conventional art genres. Though often berated among liberal-minded critics as an inferior genre catering to retrogressive ideologies, fantasy, just as much its more politically-correct twin SF, has in recent times gained no less formidable following, serving as an equally symptomatic testament to the mass yearnings for a new form of society alternative to the one presented by late capitalism.
Karel Čapek’s two well-known SF (or scientific fantasy) plays Rossum’s Universal Robots (1920) and The Makropolus Case (1922) and Fritz Lang’s sci-fi classic Metropolis (1927) are path-breaking contemporaneous works, which have long enjoyed both popular and critical acclaim in their respective realms of literature and film. The reason which draws our attention to these classic texts today, however, is not merely due to their historical interest. For not only do these works bring to view the singular geopolitical conditions (of the early twentieth-century Czechoslovakia and Germany) that produced such uncompromising texts but preserve, in nigh archetypical forms, the vital energies that propelled the post-First World War generation to sketch an outline of alternative route to future. More significant still are the particular manners in which the given works thematize the concept secret: Čapek by taking full advantage of the linguistic medium of dramatic dialogue while at the same time pushing the sociological ramification of Gestus (in its widest sense conceived by Bertolt Brecht) to its limit and Lang by making his film self-reflective of the unrealized potentialities of the new medium.
How are we to do justice to these creative legacies? The answer lies, no doubt, in rigorously probing the singular geopolitcal condition in which we find ourselves sandwiched in between the twin towering traditions of East Asia and European West. But as with Čapek and Lang, we must at the same time carefully examine the surging energies that galvanize the current popular culture, which not only testifies to the undying effects of globalization but no less significantly harks back to the traumas of our initial contact with the Western modernity.

참고자료

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