Earticle

초록

영어

This essay examines the postmodern understanding of fact, fiction, and truth in Hanif Kureishi’s The Last Word in order to contend that postmodernist doubts about universal Truth should not be conflated with post-truth politics. Studies on post-truth phenomena have claimed that post-truth politics simplified and misused postmodernism. The essay suggests that we need a theoretical ground to criticize post-truth politics without reinstating universal Truth and that The Last Word might help understand critical differences between postmodernism and post-truth. A ‘biographical-novel-in-disguise’ that has been read as a fictionalized account of V.S. Naipaul, The Last Word depicts a young biographer’s struggle to represent a renowned writer’s life, blurring the boundary between fact and fiction, or biography and the novel. Like ‘historiographic metafiction,’ The Last Word is based upon postmodernist doubts about our ability to unproblematically know and transparently represent the past—which is always already textualized and subject to interpretation. The Last Word paradoxically reveals its interest in truth by delving into the complexities of representing truth. In The Last Word, facts are to be interpreted to be meaningful and the struggle to know truth leads not to the discovery of what really happened but to a rewriting of the past. What The Last Word teaches us is not that facts do not matter but that they are not enough. To conclude, The Last Word offers postmodern insights that should not be conflated with the disregard and rejection of fact and truth in the post-truth era.

목차

Ⅰ. 들어가며
Ⅱ. 포스트트루스와 포스트모더니즘
Ⅲ. 『마지막 말』에 나타난 사실, 허구, 진실
Ⅳ. 나가며
인용문헌
Abstract

키워드

저자

• 이정화 [ Jung-Hwa Lee | 조선대학교 교수 ]

참고문헌

발행기관

간행물

표지보기 관심저널 등록

• 간행물명

  영어영문학21 [English21]

• 간기

  계간

• pISSN

  1738-4052

• 수록기간

  1967~2025

• 등재여부

  KCI 등재

• 십진분류

  KDC 840 DDC 820