삶, 문학, 글쓰기—도널드 마귤리즈의 『이야기모음집』에 나타난 인생의 텍스트성 (Life, Literature, and Writing: Textuality of Life in Donald Margulies’ Collected Stories)

서지정보

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· 저자명 : 최석훈

초록

The essay examines the relationship between life and writing in Margulies’ 1997 Pulitzer finalist, Collected Stories, from a post-structuralist perspective. According to Derrida, meaning is possible only within the socially-constructed sign system he calls ‘writing.’ This view implies that even a person’s life should be written and read as text to acquire meaning. In the play, writing does not only serve as the medium of the characters’ relationship but also represents their lives themselves. Ruth Steiner, a Jewish writer long past her heyday, and her protégé Lisa Morrison begin to build an intimate relationship as Lisa visits Ruth’s apartment to have an individual conference on her writing assignment. Prior to the meeting, Lisa read all of Ruth’s works to become her big fan and Ruth also ‘met’ Lisa through the latter’s short story based on her life; throughout the play, they read each other as text. Ruth hires Lisa as her secretary and guides her way into professional writing as her mentor for 6 years. However, conflict arises when Lisa writes and publishes a novel that seems to be based on Ruth’s most cherished secret without her permission. At the heart of the conflict is the textuality of human life and their rejection of each other’s reading. Unlike most performance reviews of the play which tend to reduce the play to the issues of law and ethics surrounding creative freedom, the paper argues that the play provides a profound philosophical insight about life as text that has an infinite possibility of meaning.

영어초록

The essay examines the relationship between life and writing in Margulies’ 1997 Pulitzer finalist, Collected Stories, from a post-structuralist perspective. According to Derrida, meaning is possible only within the socially-constructed sign system he calls ‘writing.’ This view implies that even a person’s life should be written and read as text to acquire meaning. In the play, writing does not only serve as the medium of the characters’ relationship but also represents their lives themselves. Ruth Steiner, a Jewish writer long past her heyday, and her protégé Lisa Morrison begin to build an intimate relationship as Lisa visits Ruth’s apartment to have an individual conference on her writing assignment. Prior to the meeting, Lisa read all of Ruth’s works to become her big fan and Ruth also ‘met’ Lisa through the latter’s short story based on her life; throughout the play, they read each other as text. Ruth hires Lisa as her secretary and guides her way into professional writing as her mentor for 6 years. However, conflict arises when Lisa writes and publishes a novel that seems to be based on Ruth’s most cherished secret without her permission. At the heart of the conflict is the textuality of human life and their rejection of each other’s reading. Unlike most performance reviews of the play which tend to reduce the play to the issues of law and ethics surrounding creative freedom, the paper argues that the play provides a profound philosophical insight about life as text that has an infinite possibility of meaning.

참고자료

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