Earticle

Postdrama and New Narrative: Crimp's Fewer Emergencies Yongeun Lee (Sungshin Women's University) The aim of this article is to determine what exactly 'postdrama' and 'the contemporary narrative' are, through a reading of Martin Crimp's Fewer Emergencies. Traditional works of drama are representations of reality, and they function through the use of tension, development, climax and resolution. However, these techniques are not used in the postdramatic theatre, which also completely ignores the representative aspect of traditional drama. Writers of postdrama seek neither synthesis nor logical linearity. Instead, postdrama is characterized by a lack of synthesis, and by parataxis, episodic composition and dream-images. The first part of this article concentrates on the question of why Fewer Emergencies is a good example of postdrama. The work is devoid of naturalistic details and discourse backgrounds such as the characteristics of the characters, the social conditions of the characters and the causes of events. Fewer Emergencies is composed of very short episodes that are divided into fragments. Therefore, the work is neither consistent nor synthetic. Furthermore, the story is filled with parataxis so that no episode can be evaluated as superior or inferior to other episodes. The stories of the shooting, the mailman's son and the mailman in his bed are not connected causally, but are simply arranged and presented in a row. The second part of this article shows that in Fewer Emergencies it is difficult to arrive at any definite and certain meanings, because its narratives continuously nullifies what has come before and sometimes what is taking place. All the narratives are incomplete, thus precluding any certain and fixed meanings. The narrative moves from one unconnected story to the next. Therefore, as the story fragments are not concluded, the meanings become diluted and are subject to change.

본 논문은 스페인어에서 병렬관계로 나타나는 문장구조 중 특이한 양상을 보이는 한 유형을 분석한다. 이 구문은 한정적 관계절을 포함하여 종속관계를 형성하는 구문과 외형적인 구분이 불가능하다. 따라서 이를 지칭하기 위하여 parataxis enmascarada(위장 병렬관계)라는 용어를 사용한다. 우선 위장 병렬관계로 나타나는 첫째 문장에 포함된 부정 명사구와 해석 상 이 명사구를 수식하는 역할을 수행하는 둘째 문장의 의미론적 특징을 분석한다. 이를 통하여 일반적인 한정적 관계절과는 달리 위장 병렬관계 하에서 둘째 문장에 의해 전달되는 정보가 필요 불가결한 요소임을 입증한다. 이에 더하여 두 문장은 통사적으로 독립된 관계에 있음을 논한다. 둘째 문장은 완전한 좌향외곽을 갖춘 모문의 지위를 지닌다. 이 문장의 영역에서 모문에 한정하여 발생할 수 있는 현상이 나타나는 점과 위장 병렬관계에 놓인 두 문장 사이에서 성분 이동이 일어날 수 없는 점을 경험적 근거로 제시한다.

This paper aims at analyzing a type of paratactic constructions in Spanish that is, apparently, not likely to be what it is, thus, our term parataxis enmascarada (masked parataxis). These constructions exhibit a formal similarity to the strings containing restrictive relative clauses. I show that two clausal units forming them do not have a hypotactic relation, but a paratactic one. To that end, I make a semantic observation on the indefinite DP of the first clause of the parataxis around which the second one interpretably plays a role of modifier. Then, I argue that the information conveyed by the latter clause is not dispensable for forming the whole construction; it makes a bipolar information structure together with the one provided by the first clause, as can be expected from two elements paratactically related. Further, I claim that these two clauses are syntactically independent, and that the second one has matrix clause status with its full-fledged left periphery functional projections. I provide empirical data in order to support this analysis through the licensing of some Main Clause Phenomena in the second clause, and the ban of the movement of constituents between two paratactic clauses.