小說批評의 現在 = Contemporary Criticism of Fiction

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Terry Eagleton says in his Literary Theory (1983): “Indeed one might very roughly periodize the history of modern literary theory in three stages: a preoccupation with the author (Romanticism and the nineteenth century); an exclusive concern with the text (New Criticism); and a marked shift of attention to the reader over recent years.” This thesis is to study the second and third stage of his classification.
A story must have a plot, characters, and a setting. It must also have a story-teller: a narrative voice that presents the story to the reader. When we are talking about narrative voice, we are talking about point of view, the method of narration that determines the position, or angle of vision, from which the story is told.
The art of fiction does not begin until the novelist thinks of his story as a matter to be shown, to be so exhibited that it will tell itself. And since Flaubert, many authors and critics have been convinced that ‘dramatic’ modes of narration are superior to any mode that allows for direct appearances by the author. If it is dramatic vividness that the novelist wants, the best thing he can do is to find a way of eliminating the narrator and exposing the scene directly to the reader. But whether an impersonal novelist hides behind a single narrator or observer, the author' voice is never silenced. Everything he shows will serve to tell; the line between showing and telling is always to some degree an arbitrary one. In short, the author's judgement is always evident to any one who knows how to look for it.
Time is one of the ideas which have engaged literary minds throughout the ages and which have received special attention in contemporary literature. For fiction, a distinction must be made between the chronological duration of the reading, the chronological duration of the writing and the duration of the theme of the novel.
Myth is a direct metaphysical statement beyond science. It embodies in an articulated structure of symbol or narrative a vision of reality. The study of myths reveals about the mind and character of a people, and just as dreams reflect the unconscious desires and anxieties of the individual, so myths are the symbolic projections of a people's hopes, values, fears and aspirations. Myth is to be defined as a complex of stories-some no doubt fact, and some fantasy- which human beings regard as demonstrations of the inner meaning of the universe and of human life. Although every people has its own distinctive mythology, myth is universal. Furthermore, similar motifs or themes may be found among many different mythologies, and certain images that recur in the myths of peoples widely separated in time and place tend to have a common meaning or, more accurately, tend to elicit comparable psychological responses and to serve similar cultural functions. Such motifs and images are called archetype. Stated simply, archetypes are universal symbols. With brilliant audacity N. Frye identifies myth with literature, asserting that myth is a structural organizing principle of literary form and that an archetype is essentially an element of one's literary experience. And he claims that mythology as a whole provides a kind of diagram or blueprint of what literature as whole is all about, an imaginative survey of the human situation from the the beginning to the end, from the height to the depth, of what is imaginatively conceivable.
For the past few years we have been witnessing a shift in perspective (a new way of seeing) in the field of literary theory. The words reader and audience have acceded to a starring role. We may safely affirm that a preccupation with audience and interpretation has become central to contemporary American and Continental theory and criticism. Reception theory examines the reader's role in literature and as such is a fairly development. The reader has always been the most underpriviledged of this trio(i.e. the text, the author and the reader)-strangely, since without him or her there would be no literary text at all. For literature to happen, the reader is quite as vital as the author. Audience-oriented (reader-response) criticism is not one field but many, not a single widely trodden path but a multiplicity of crisscrossing. The author makes his reader as he makes his second self, and the most successful reading is one in which the created selves, author and reader, can complete agreement: (W. Booth). The work is more than the text, for the text only takes on life when it is realized(the term proposed by Ingarden), and the realization is by no means independent of the individual disposition of the reader. The convergence of text and reader brings the literary work into existence. Furthermore W. Iser asserts that the literary text makes no objectively real demands on its readers, it opens up a freedom that everyone can interpret in his own way. For instance, a poem really means whatever any reader seriously believes it to mean. Just as the number of mental contexts into which a poem can be translated is infinite, so is the number of possible meanings of the poem or the work itself infinite. And it is clear who is making these meanings-the reader.
Once we decide that readers can make meaning, we begin to see it happening all around us- that is what reading is after all. Meaning is made precisely as we want it to be made, and as usual we want different things. Unanimity is neither possible nor desirable, and reality is never unequivocal. Yes, authors do make meaning but-many of us are finding it increasingly necessary to say - yes, readers make meaning. The text itself is really no more than a series of ‘cues’ to the reader, invitation to construct a piece of language into meaning. Without this continuous active participation on the reader's part, there would be no literary work at all.

목차 (Table of Contents)

• Ⅰ. 서언
• Ⅱ. 신비평 이후-형식주의 비평과 소설
• Ⅲ. 시점 문제
• Ⅳ. Booth의 Rhetoric
• Ⅴ. 소설과 시간 문제
• Ⅵ. Frye의 비평 체계
• Ⅶ. Reader-Response 비평
• Ⅷ. 결언-소설의 가능성