Abstract

ABSTRACT:

This article investigates what it means that the aesthetic choices of an older realism have been persistently replicated in the global (semi-) periphery. In the fully modern, industrialized, and even cybernetic metropolises outside the West, we find a curious resistance to the modernist styles to which avant-garde practice has been driven to conform in the taste cultures of the international art world. Analyzing the demands of western modernist style that influence the process of making "world literature/cinema," this article explores the relationship of peripheral thinking to the history of aesthetic forms in the core by taking up the case of South Korean literature and cinema. Through textual analysis of South Korean neo-realism or Shin Sasiljueui found in Chang-dong Lee's Poetry (2010), in particular, this article illuminates one of the ways in which South Korean neo-realism discloses the power of a realism that has not yet fully blossomed. South Korean cinema, in particular, has long struggled between a desire to be responsive to western expectations of Third World cinema, on the one hand, and to be liberated from its desire for recognition, on the other. Looking at how this dilemma is reflected and finally negated in Chang-dong Lee's realism, I argue that his aesthetics allow us to rethink realism not as a dead end on the way to modernism, but as a sort of ethical program after the hegemony of western modernist aesthetics.

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