ScholarWorks@숙명여자대학교

초록

The purpose of this study is to examine the problems of representation from the perspective of disability theory by way of re-reading and re-screening Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame of Paris and its film texts. In his Les Miserables Hugo represented the wretched of the earth. Interestingly enough, however, the disabled are not represented at all. In the gothic representation of the monstrosity of Quasimodo in Notre-Dame of Paris, Hugo has shown his incredible genius in order to deliver the ideology of his romantic revolution against the authoritarian monarchism and he tried to transcend the bourgeoisie hegemony of normalcy. In the process of filmic reproduction of the text, the essential message of Notre-Dame of Paris turns out to be seriously distorted in terms of the stereotyping of the disabled. The deformity of Quasimodo is commodified and romanticized to meet the taste of the audience in the logic of market capitalism. The problems of representation of disability produced prejudices and discrimination against the different bodies. The fantasy of modern subject should be shattered in order to realize that all man are incomplete and death-bound subjects. It is my argument that to accept the “dismodern” subjectivity would be one way to be able to diminish the misconceptions of disability and to recognize the difference of human bodies.

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