• 미술이론과 현장
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• 제7호
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• pp.189-240
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• 2009

This essay aims to develop a critical approach of interpretation in examining the panoptical condition of representation that is said to permeate the tradition of modern realism in novels and paintings. In defining this approach, I am interested in the problem or inability of panoptical representation to tell a coherent story of solitude(solitary confinement, isolation, self-absorption, etc.) in a range of texts from prison documents to paintings and novels, and also what might occasion such an inability including social, material, or stylistic contradictions and conflicting epistemological angles. This task potentially anticipates a trajectory of readings and investigations that cuts through the history of panoptical representation, which is outside the scope of this essay. In this writing, I will engage in a series of debates with what I consider as major theories and views of panoptical representation offered by Jeremy Bentham, John Bender, and Michael Fried. Based on this, I will formulate a conceptual or methodological frame of discourse that would envisage an anti-panoptical approach of interpretation. As an attempt to validate this formulation, I will offer a reading of Henry Mayhew's Criminal Prisons of London and Scenes of Prison Life(1862), a case of panoptical representation that produces a peculiar sense of ambivalence while accounting for sites of penal solitude.