earticle

영어

In this essay, I have endeavored to elucidate the theoretical bedrock of postmodern sublimity with a view to establishing a new aesthetics of postmodern drama in our contemporary age. The first step is to conceptually clarify the distinction between the postmodernity and the modernity. The second is to illuminate the conception of postmodern sublimity through exploring those philosophical contentions made by contemporary thinkers including Zygmunt Bauman, Theodore W. Adorno and Jean Baudrillard. To name a few relevant ideas, focused is Bauman’s notion of “liquidity” arousing in the contemporary minds ignorance, impotence and humiliation in the wake of experiencing the phenomena of globalization and postmodernism. Included is Adorno’s analysis of the sublime power of capital on culture industry in the wake of the degradation of the Enlightenment project. Further, I have attempted to reveal that Baudrillard’s sublimity rests on the concept of hyperreality created in the structure of simulation devoid of referentiality. Lastly, John Birringer’s performance project of staging the tales of two cities, Dallas and Genova, is discussed in terms of Baudrillard’s hallucinatory nature of hyperreality substantiated in them.