진실성 그 너머, 방법으로서의 기업가 자서전 - 90년대 영웅적 기업가라는 환상을 넘어서 -

Abstract

The phenomenon in which the books written by the heads of large enterprises in the early-1990s became bestsellers is an important index that directly reveals the landscape of culture in Korean society at the time. Bestsellers directly reflect the desire of the public of the times and intensively form the desire of the general public, simultaneously. The phenomenon in which the books written by entrepreneurs in the 1990s became bestsellers reflects the desire of the public of the times towards economic success. At the same time, it shows the process in which entrepreneurial success is created and organized as the desire of the public. Paying attention to the fact that the bestsellers written by entrepreneurs at the time took a life-narrative form that remembers and narrates the authors’ own individual lives, this study particularly proposes the necessity of a narrative approach to this. The trajectory in which private records and first-person narrations about entrepreneurs’ lives emerged and expanded as a persuasive rhetorical style towards the public in the 1990s is an aspect of an important cultural symptom in Korean society of the times. The grammar of heroic entrepreneurs for success and the logic of the capital were realized, not by the objective figures and statistics that visualize their economic achievements and various managerial skills and knowledge, but by the subjectivity of the narrative self that thinks of themselves as beings in the world and signifies themselves. Through the books, the entrepreneurs realized themselves as concrete and individualized individuals with their private histories, not as the general and abstract capitalist class. This was also the process by which the authors would build up an ideal entrepreneurial self-image pursued by themselves. These books made the public experience entrepreneurs existing as ‘sublime beings’ under the capitalist system as individuals with unique and private histories. Moreover, they served as books for cultivating one’s morals, which make readers accept the entrepreneurial self, created by their self-narratives as an ideal self-model. In that sense, the phenomenon in which the books written by entrepreneurs become bestsellers was the externalization of the process in which successful entrepreneurs grab hegemony in the political, social, and cultural areas beyond the economic domain and the process in which Homo Economicus expanded him or herself, getting a new status as a universal self-model.