고려대학교

초록/요약

In response to the Mutlticulturalist claims of the ethico-political as well as the Postmodern claims of the aesthetic in literary and cultural studies, this paper reviews the problematic relationship and entertwinement of aesthetics and ethics, and suggests its revisionary implications toward the current literary studies. The relational discussion of the two disciplines is best instanced in Kant's luminary statement around the end of Critique of Practical Reason: “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and the more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above and the moral law within.” Actually this declaration epitomized Kantian efforts in making a metaphoric and symbolic bridge from the ethical to the aesthetic. It is Lyotard in particular who applied the Kantian idea of the sublime and justified the symbolic representation in the ethical controversy surrounding the issue of Holocaust. Lyotard warned the witnesses and testimonies by the Holocaust survivors should be regarded as, at least, sublime allusions to the unspeakable atrocities. Amid the New Historical, Multicultural, and even Postmodern environment, Eagleton also advised us to dialectically understand the humanistic legacy of the aesthetic concerns born in the Enlightenment era. After discussing the three major theorists, this study focuses on Satya P. Mohanty, and concludes with a commentary on the ways to supplement his revisionist theory of Multiculturism and New Historicism.