포스트 모더니즘과 현대 미국시

Abstract

The main stream of criticism on postmodernism in Korea has attacked it as a cultural logic of the post-industrial Western society, confusing "postmodernity" with "postmodernism," and trying to answer the question "Does the so-called postmodernism have some intrinsic values?" Another stream has focused its concern on the authorial origin of the cultural phenomenon, or its relationship to modernism and post-structuralism. But to understand it more properly, we should question "What is postmodernism?" rather than "Is postmodernism valuable to us?" or "Who started the movement?" The postmodern culture which has developed since around 1945 in the Western hemisphere illustrated many negative aspects of a life-denying culture, despite its material prosperity. Its most unbearable attributes are sterile homogeneity, uncertainty, absurdity, mercantile ethic, absence of moral values, irrationality, innocent victim, entropy in history, exhaustion, overwhelming mechanical forces, mercantilization of knowledge and language, and so on. These may be defined as the negative side of "postmodernity," which has been nourished by logocentricism in the post modern culture, and embodied as mass culture, media society, the society of spectacles, the bureaucratic society of controlled consumption, postindustrial society, and the highly industrial society.