노만 메일러의 포스트모던 음모론: 『오스왈드 이야기』
Norman Mailer’s Oswald’s Tale: The Critical Power and Its Limit in Contemporary American Conspiracy Theory
- 발행
- 2009
- 소속·발행
- 고려대학교
- 출처
- 국내 KCI
- UCI
- G704+INS000000909-ART001390593
- 원문등록
- 2009-11-20
- 원문
- 원문 보기 ↗
개념
키워드
Norman Mailer, Oswald’s Tale, conspiracy theory, Emersonian individualism, Homi Bhabha, Fredric Jameson, Norman Mailer, Oswald’s Tale, conspiracy theory, Emersonian individualism, Homi Bhabha, Fredric Jameson
초록
This article explores how Oswald’s Tale continues to express Mailer’s life-long criticism of American society and the sanctioning of masculine individual dissensus. By positing Oswald as a tragic anti-hero rather than a mere chance of history, Mailer attempts to restore to the JFK assassination historical causality that the postmodern view of history is believed to challenge. Furthermore, the act of interpreting the crisis of subjectivity in contemporary American society as a result of social conspiracy also enables him to reconstruct history as a story of individual struggle against what the author assumes as a “totalitarian” American society. This gesture of refashioning history reflects the logic and social role of conspiracy theory. As Fredric Jameson argues, its attempt to grasp the mechanism of the entire society aims to restore a cohesive order to complex networks of the late capitalist society. On the other hand, however, it also contains itself within the tradition of American political literature by positing liberal individualism as the ultimate solution, and by doing so, it functions to over-simplify the discourses on subjectivity in postmodern American society.