탈식민주의 문학의 미학 : 아르마의 『아름다운 것들은 아직 태어나지 않았다』와 조이스의 『더블린 사람들』을 중심으로 Centering on A. K. Armah's The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born and James Joyce's Dubliners = Aesthetics of Postcolonial Literature

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

A. K. Armah's The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born and James Joyce's Dubliners diagnose the physical and mental situations of Ghana in Africa and Dublin in Ireland respectively, and grope for solutions to the problems in the paralyzed states of the countries. Instead of dealing with British colonialism directly, these books indirectly detect the traces of colonialism left in the lives of the people and the spatial background of the two countries. Such traces are manifested through the environmental filthiness, and the people's violence and paralytic inclination toward material well-being and power.
This kind of manifestation assaults the imperial view of history, in which the colonizers justify their existence in the colonized country in the name of 'progress' and 'civilization,' and then professes the postcolonial view of history, in which the colonized, who were originally agrarian, pastoral and innocent, have been contaminated by an urban, materialistic and corrupted way of life that "the Western serpent" introduced to "the Celtic or African Eden".
However, while Armah's book makes use of externalized formal innovation such as the shocking therapy of a military coup without any expectation for improvement, Joyce's work tries to suggest solution through a general internalized self-awareness starting from the personal reawakening of Gabriel Conroy, the hero of the last story.
The two different endings of the books with the same theme seem to be caused by the characteristic differences between the two countries and those of the two writers' views on the country, the nation, history and the world. These views result in the two different visions of postcolonial literature, in which the historical and political product of 'postcolonialism' is to be applied to literary works. One of them is 'a nationalistic view,' rather pessimistic and negative, and the other is 'a cosmopolitan view,' more optimistic and positive than the former.
In brief, it seems that postcolonial literature or criticism, which seem to be in danger of being reduced to another binary system while trying to overcome the West-centered binary system, should rather pursue a comparative methodology. And the possibility of openness to and comparison with 'the other' can be regarded as the aesthetics of postcolonial literature.