earticle

영어

Since around 2000, a series of historical and political events transformed Paul Auster from a solitary writer who communicated with the world through his writings into a writer who expresses his thoughts and opinions manifestly and publicly. Especially, as the September 11 attacks required different ethics and aesthetics to cope with the post-9/11 realities that engulfed postmodernist imagination, the principles Auster had adhered to went through transitions, as well. This article investigates the ways in which Auster responds to the post-9/11 era in his post-9/11 novel, Man in the Dark (2008). To that end, it examines the shift in the survival strategy in relation to dynamics of author and reader that veers toward a third party: the character. In so doing, it expounds upon the validity of Auster’s postmodernist aesthetics, the potential for images as an alternative to words, and suggests different ethics that comes in the form of active readership. This active readership, the reciprocal way that readers interact with texts in contrast to the passive way people consume images, is applied to the way that people cope with the post-9/11 world, in which either words or images are exploited by terrorists and governments alike. With the active readership, Auster ultimately challenges readers to develop a different ethics that can respond to the post-9/11 era.