멈춤과 재생의 시간: 제니퍼 이건의 『깡패단의 방문 』

초록

From the perspective of postmodernist debates on historicity, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad is a highly intriguing work that promotes a nonlinear sense of temporality. The novel traces the trajectories of characters involved in the music industry through nonlinear and multimedia narrative techniques, foregrounding moments of pause and the potential for renewal embedded within them. In doing so, the novel critiques a linear sense of time and instead conceptualizes an integrated, cyclical model of temporality. Through the figure of an aging rocker in the era of digital music, Egan portrays anxieties surrounding rapid technological development and the resulting sense of obsolescence experienced by the older generation. However, Chapter 12 of the novel, written in the form of a PowerPoint presentation, exemplifies a belief in the interconnectedness of past, present, and future by demonstrating how digital technology can offer a solution to the traditional problem of restoring familial bonds. This interconnectedness signifies a new mode of historiography that records not only events themselves but also the intervals and pauses between them. Furthermore, the rock concert in the final chapter, made possible through digital marketing via social media, symbolically represents the theme of regeneration through the encounter between past and present.

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