사피어-워프 가설과 탈인종주의 서사: 테드 창의 「너의 인생 이야기」

초록

“Story of Your Life,” written by Ted Chiang, illustrates the recent popularity of speculative fiction within the field of Asian American literature. As a “postracial” fiction, it does not foreground Asian American characters or their ethnic identity. Chiang appropriates the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which holds that a language influences its speakers’ worldview and shapes their perceptions of the world. In the story, an alien species called heptapod has a semasiographic writing system, forming its teleological worldview and expressing its simultaneous mode of consciousness, in contrast to a sequential mode of human awareness. The story demonstrates the characteristics of postracial fiction, which explores how “race” is constituted by not only biology but also other factors such as language, education, politics, and social relations. Chiang indicates that a language molds the mind of a certain race or species. He also raises an issue of race by portraying the heptapods’ writing system as being similar to the languages of Asian culture, such as Chinese ideograms and the Arabic alphabet. Here, Asia becomes the place of the other that defines the contours of the West—a reminder of Orientalism. Arrival, a film adaptation of Chiang’s story, casts light on this political dynamic between East and West by inserting the episode of a US-China conflict in the plot. Despite the aforementioned limitation, “Story of Your Life” attempts an escape from an anthropocentric mindset by depicting the protagonist’s human-alien hybridity achieved by language acquisition, which is shared by readers in the process of reading the story.

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