초록 열기/닫기 버튼
This essay revisits Joyce Carol Oates' 1969 novel them, “a work of history in fictional form” in terms of the space of compromise and explores the intricate relationships of people living in a modern city. How does one survive in the margins of a bleak modern city where every promising dreaming is completely blocked? How does the fictional form written from a personal perspective become public history? As a socio-economic document based on autobiographical facts, as a psychodrama about the awakening of levels of consciousness, them reveals the underlying mechanism concerning violence of man, authority, system, and society. In the process of creating “history in fictional form” beyond an otherwise formless life, Oates excavates the fantasy of independent men, harmonious families and communities and portrays seething violences of city civilization as the power of vitiating the human potential. What is formed and confirmed throughout these terrible turmoils is the writer's belief in writing and a possibility of opening another history through the acts of writing and reading. At this point, her melodrama becomes a ‘Bildungsroman' which initiates both heroines and readers into a new stage of consciousness, marking the state of “being-together” and “feeling-together” in this world, here and now, as the only space of compromise.
키워드열기/닫기 버튼
fictional form, city space, them, being-together, here and now, compromise
