Impossible speech : the politics of representation in contemporary Korean literature and film /
"Common sense tells us that the politics of a work of art appears in its message. That message may appear via a formal device or in figural language, but the text is expected to make its message intelligible to the reader in a familiar form and in language that lies within the boundaries of wha...
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
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New York :
Columbia University Press,
[2024]
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| Summary: | "Common sense tells us that the politics of a work of art appears in its message. That message may appear via a formal device or in figural language, but the text is expected to make its message intelligible to the reader in a familiar form and in language that lies within the boundaries of what is ordinarily considered sayable. Yet wherever intelligibility is posited, assumed, or demanded, there is something relegated to unintelligibility. Impossible Speech finds that it is at these moments, relegated to the nonsensical and hence the nonpolitical, where we find the political gesture of art. The book aims to explore both the ways the work of art can undermine this demand for consensual meaning in its presentation of the limits of representation-in the "impossible speech" of those who are not asked, expected, or allowed to put forward their thoughts in discourse-and the grounds of legitimacy upon which a given statement or representation of speech is understood (or not understood) as "political." Following Rancière, the book makes the question of the limits of speakability coterminous with the question of politics, understood not as the organization of consensus but more fundamentally as the determination of the limits of speech-who is allowed to speak and what is allowed to be spoken. The main chapters focus on four central figures in recent fiction and film-the migrant laborer, the survivor of or witness to state violence, the North Korean refugee, and the socially excluded urban precariat"-- |
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| Physical Description: | viii, 225 pages ; 23 cm |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 9780231208482 0231208480 9780231208499 0231208499 |