Modern Drama as a Project of Enlightenment

서지정보

· 발행기관 : 한국연극학회
· 수록지 정보 : 한국연극학 / 1권 / 63호 / 165 ~ 199페이지
· 저자명 : 황훈성

초록

In this paper, I have endeavored to illuminate the attributes of modern drama through tracing several manifestoes and essays made by the trailblazers based on my own taxonomy of four aspects of modern drama as well as pinpointing the point of bifurcation between modernity and postmodernity manifested on contemporary stage. My touchstone of the modernity on modern drama is whether a literary work reflects the project of Enlightenment, since at stake is less the matter of stylistics than the world view that is represented in a literary work.
We have four quintessential components of the Enlightenment project: 1) a scientific notion of objective truth; 2) a philosophical notion of humanism based on individualism; 3) a political vision of political correctness founded on human rationality; and 4) finally a pedagogical idea of educating the public (the gist of Aufklärung is to shed the light on ignorant people). From the outset, these four attributes provide an overarching paradigm in many a crucial manifestoes of modern drama. In an effort to trace these four elements affecting the aesthetics of modernism on stage in its embryonic stage, I have made a brief survey of declarations made by those playwrights and critics following Ibsen and Strindberg.
Firstly, Enlightenment thinkers tend to think what is permanent in truth value could be gained only in the field of natural science. Natural science is thus enthroned as the king of all sciences which dictates the legitimization of knowledge. Secondly, modern drama philosophically stands for humanism based on individualism which was burgeoning with the empowerment of the bourgeois class at the turn of nineteenth century. Thirdly, modern drama embraces the idea of political correctness founded on human rationality, Lastly, the trend of Enlightenment, as the concept(Aufklärung) signifies, is characterized by educational fervor.
Also, I have attempted to clarify the modernity in drama clearly distinguishable from the postmodernity in our contemporary drama by pinpointing the site of their bifurcation in terms of aesthetics and politics as contested by a number of postmodern thinkers including Adorno, Baudrillard and Lyotard. The thrust of my argument is thus, that the modernity in modern drama is not sustainable in our postmodern age, since the status of reason is shakable as is depreciated as ‘instrumental reason’.

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