This Dear, Dear Land: Shaping the Nation in English Renaissance Writing

( Suh Reen Han ) 영미문학연구회 2009 영미문학연구 Vol.17 No.-

This essay explores the burgeoning nationalism of Renaissance England with a particular focus on the figure of the land found in three Elizabethan writings: George Gascoigne`s "The Princely Pleasures at the Courte at Kenelwoorth," Raphael Holinshed`s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, and William Shakespeare`s King Richard II. Proposing to define England through representations of the attachment between the land and the monarch, these texts ultimately fail at drawing a neat parallel between these two symbols of the nation as other dissenting forces-courtiers, common people, shifting socio-economic systems-wedge their way into the texts to assert their association with the land and thereby undermine the monarch`s monopoly on the English soil. The land, therefore, becomes a tropological site of dynamic competition among heterogeneous voices in dispute over who or what is "English." A close textual analysis of this discursive competition taking place around the figure of the land reveals a certain political ambiguity intrinsic to a nation born from the monarchical system. A seemingly paradoxical desire to unite and dissent exists between the monarch and the people precisely because the sovereign will of the nation is represented and enacted by one individual ruler. That is, as long as Queen Elizabeth is England, the nation-building project of the English people requires the celebration of their dear queen even while they voice their individual interests and ambitions and imagine other grounds for national solidarity than the crown, such as language, history, and culture. Likewise, reacting to the era`s ambiguous standing between traditional medievalism and incipient modernity, the monarch straddles the dual identity of a knightly protector of the land and the people (as seen in Gascoigne) and a modern individual who, no longer able to rely on the commodified land, turns to such cultural properties as the English language and patriotic sentiment to found his sovereignty upon his subjectivity (as seen in Shakespeare). My emphasis on the ambivalent forces of monarchical hegemony, both constructively unifying and oppressively antagonistic, in the early stages of English nationalism makes moot the dispute among historicist critics who impose their political beliefs on textual interpretations only to take sides in deciding who represents "England"-the ruler or the people. By focusing on the literary figure of the land and its political ambiguity, my analysis of the texts offers a far more historically suggestive reading, ultimately putting Renaissance nationalism in its proper historical context so that we can gain veritable perspective on the significance of land and territory in the idea and experience of the nation.

Kant and Coleridge : Addictions of the Modern Self

Suh-Reen Han 19세기영어권문학회 2013 19세기 영어권 문학 Vol.17 No.2

This essay explores the question of the body and addiction raised by Immanuel Kant and Samuel Taylor Coleridge as they fashion themselves into modern subjects. While studies of the philosophical connection between Kant and Coleridge have well been established, the somewhat counterintuitive relationship between the health-mongering Kant and the opium addict Coleridge has not drawn enough critical attention. Looking closely at the ways in which Kant and Coleridge attend to their bodies, this essay argues that both forms of obsession over the body ? whether as a health nut or as a junkie ? share the problem of dealing with the high pressures of being a modern subject. Modern subjectivity is first and foremost grounded on the idea of autonomy : the free and rational “I”. The idea of autonomy puts an emphasis on the independence and self-sufficiency of the modern self. The Enlightenment imperative is that the subject ought to be an individual in full possession of his or her self ; concepts born from this demand ? right, reason, imagination ? are predicated on the individual as the basic form of subjectivity. Kant’s compulsive dependence on a self-devised physical regimen to prolong life and maintain mental health is a symptomatic sign of how demanding this imperative can be. Coleridge’s opium addiction, on the hand, sheds light on the possibilities and limitations of the Romantic poet’s identity as an original author. A careful analysis of the bodily addictions of these two figures offers an intriguing way of tracing the connections and tensions between Enlightenment and Romanticism at the birth of the modern subject.

Byron’s Queer Lyric: “To Thyrza”

( Suh-reen Han ) 한국영미문학페미니즘학회 2018 영미문학페미니즘 Vol.26 No.3

This essay is a study of a particularly “queer” moment in Byron’s lyric poetry. In “To Thyrza,” a short poem Byron wrote in response to the death of John Edleston, a choirboy Byron fell in love with at Cambridge, the speaker struggles through an exceedingly convoluted and ambiguous passage to express his excruciating pain. In answer to this perplexing poem, this essay proposes a study of the correlation between queer desire and the lyric form in Byron’s poetry. The lyric is not a poetic form usually associated with Byron, and yet in “To Thyrza,” we find a poet who relies on the lyric voice to express what is the most private and dearest to his heart. Queer desire has always been a slippery slope for those who question the possibility of a proper language for desire, and poststructuralist theories of sexuality have looked to language as a site of displacement and substitution for illicit desire. This essay’s reflection on queer lyric is an intervention into this poststructuralist perspective. Lyric poetry is a peculiar fusion of voice and text, and the intrinsic tension between these two linguistic impulses in the lyric has us wonder what the lyric voice can do beyond and against textual displacements of desire. When the lyric voice makes itself heard somewhere outside the structure of the text, it makes space for the voice of displaced desire to reverberate as in an echo box. Queer lyric resides in that space, and this essay’s reading of Byron’s “To Thyrza” contemplates the radical possibility of such a queer lyric.

The Aesthete as the Modern Man

Suh-Reen Han 19세기영어권문학회 2010 19세기 영어권 문학 Vol.14 No.1

Reading Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray as a novel that performs Foucault’s idea of discursive formation, this essay explores various formal aspects of discursive formation as figured by the novel’s statements, most notably the highly stylized epigrams. Words in the novel, I argue, operate at the level of the surface, converging from different disciplines to give shape to Dorian Gray, who with his two faces emerges as a de-subjectified “type” of the new discourse of Hedonism. At the site of such occurrence, we come to recognize a new form of knowledge appearing between the apparent “faces” of the novel: an unarticulated but already understood epistemology of homosexuality whose silence gives form to the inherent paradox between expression and repression?the “already-said” and the “never-said”?in discourse. Wilde’s novel presents homosexuality as a residual, yet potentially subversive, form of knowledge emerging from the fissures between contending ideas of art and morality. Dorian’s mysterious absence hiding unspeakable acts of perversion and his prominent presence as the new artist type both work to epitomize this dynamic process of discursive formation. With new aestheticism forming the other side of homoeroticism, Wilde’s novel thus stages the generation and representation of power through a network of words and tactics that construct discourse?i.e., Foucauldian power which resides in the knowledge produced by discursive practices. As this essay concludes, The Picture of Dorian Gray does not just refer to art as the figure for discourse with its innately subversive power; it also performs power through the particular form of art that is the novel. The self-reflexivity of the novel allows us to read it as a narrative about discursive formation and to experience it as a singular event in which a new discourse of art and life occurs to turn the course of history.

The Touching Hand: The Body that Queers Western Epistemology

Suh-Reen Han 19세기영어권문학회 2020 19세기 영어권 문학 Vol.24 No.1

This essay contemplates the reparative possibilities of the performative body that feels and touches. A loose, and perhaps unexpected, assemblage of literary texts coinciding with the rise of modern epistemology in and around the Enlightenment movement will demonstrate a surprisingly persistent awareness of how the body performs against dominant ideology. More specifically, we will look at the trope of the hand that touches instead of makes or writes to explore how the tactile act and senses interfere with the humanistic figure of the hand that serves traditional Western epistemology. Revisioning Sedgwick’s phenomenology of the touch through the hands that haunt select gothic and Romantic texts will be a useful exercise in thinking through the critical possibilities of queer theory. The queer becomes a question beyond gender and sex in its radical critique of the epistemological foundation of Western culture.

Surviving the Revolution: Wordsworth`s Spots of Time, Trauma, and History

( Suh Reen Han ) 한국영어영문학회 2013 영어 영문학 Vol.59 No.6

This essay argues that Wordsworth`s spots of time in The Prelude have a deeper connection with his sense of history than has commonly been perceived by critics. Deviating from the viewpoint that the spots of time signal Wordsworth`s turn from historical to poetical interest, this essay observes that the spots of time recur across the boundary between history and poetry. A close look at the figure of the "spot" in Books 9 and 10 of The Prelude (1805) reveal that it marks the punctual points in the poet`s encounter with history where the individual mind suffers a sense of severe discordance with the world. Often that sense originates from the inability to comprehend the magnitude of the French Revolution and its violence. Freud``s analysis of war neurosis helps to unveil the traumatic nature of Wordsworth`s revolutionary experiences, the shock of which is repeated and intensified with each spot that marks the revolution`s monumental impact on the poet`s mind and feeling. A sense of history as the irrational repetition of fear emerges with each repetition of the spot, offering the most profound critique of a revolution forever seized in that punctual juncture of historical rupture. Wordsworth`s encounter with history leaves behind a certain pattern of the mind and residue of feeling that determine the spots of time after the revolution, giving him a way to put into poetic figure the enigma of human nature and the natural world. Thus, Wordsworth`s poetic form rises out of the traumatic experience of having lived and survived the revolution.

Creaturely Right in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

( Suh-reen Han ) 영미문학연구회 2020 영미문학연구 Vol.38 No.-

This essay raises the question of creaturely right and its cosmopolitan possibilities in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein by arguing that the novel’s awareness toward the creaturely condition of earthly life allows us to imagine universal hospitality in the most radical sense. Exploring how the novel identifies the creature as the bearer of life and the creator as the sovereign, this essay’s reading opens another way to discuss the question of power and life beyond Foucauldian and Agambenian perspectives on biopolitics. Noting that the Judeo-Christian strain of imagining life given to creatures by the sovereign creator of life has been strangely neglected in current biopolitical discourse, the purpose of this essay is to demonstrate that the notion of creaturely life still persists in Western epistemology at the center of Enlightenment’s secularizing efforts. More importantly, the question of creaturely life and the creator’s sovereign power complicates modern biopolitics, opening another way to locate the epistemological grounds for violence toward life. This essay’s exploration of the creature’s right of life in Frankenstein will hopefully contribute to expanding our dialogue on power and life.

Byron’s Cannibalistic Imagination and the End of War

Suh-Reen Han 19세기영어권문학회 2016 19세기 영어권 문학 Vol.20 No.1

The aim of this essay is to revisit Derrida’s notion of the carnivorous subject and the question of eating well through the trope of cannibalism in Byron’s Don Juan. Cannibalism is an extreme form of flesh eating, which exposes for Byron the voracious underbelly of an economic and political system that feeds on the human flesh. Evidently, the most atrocious manifestation of such rapacious appetite for the human flesh is war, and the urgency with which Byron condemns carnage in military conflicts underlies his recourse to the radical carnivoracity of cannibalism. With the aid of Kant’s own allusion to cannibalism in his treatise on war and perpetual peace, I will offer a new perspective on the possibility of Kantian hospitality as imagined in Don Juan. Many critics have written on the question of appetite in Byron’s works, but most remain limited to the sphere of cultural and anthropological criticism. Discussions of Byron’s critique of war and politics, on the other hand, have inadequately addressed the moral imperative that is implicit in his anti-war sentiment. Exploring cannibalism as the limit experience of “eating badly” and treating others as a means rather than an end, I propose to read Byron’s figure of the cannibalistic appetite as a profoundly moral critique of modern culture’s unrelenting demand for the sacrifice of the human flesh.

1819년 영국, 셸리가 고찰한 개혁과 코즈모폴리터니즘

한서린 ( Han Suh-reen ) 영미문학연구회 2017 안과 밖 Vol.0 No.42

This essay rereads Percy Bysshe Shelley`s A Philosophical View of Reform to explore its cosmopolitan implications in light of Britain`s recent decision to leave the European Union. The Peterloo Massacre in 1819, which gave impetus to Shelley`s vindication of social and parliamentary reforms in this prose work, becomes an important platform for investigating the root cause of the nation`s oppressive and exploitative climate. The fraudulent measures that the new aristocracy takes to accumulate wealth and the violent measures that the state and the crown employ to suppress discontent are, for Shelley, disturbing signs of a deepening collusion between money and state power at the expense of the suffering working class. Against these reactionary circumstances, Shelley brings up the radical spirit of the Puritan Revolution as a sign of British exceptionalism, which should have the potential to act as a beacon of progressive light to the nation and the world in the dark. Nonviolent resistance against surreptitious violence, requested of both the laborers protesting on the field and the poets writing in the republic of letters, is imagined as a crucial way for them to rejuvenate the liberal spirit of Britain. Shelley`s unmasking of state chauvinism and envisioning of a cosmopolitan openness for his nation will resonate with those who view Brexit with deep reservations and wonder whether Britain is returning to that era when one`s freedom came at the sacrifice of others`.

오래된 코스모폴리타니즘 낭만주의문학의 세계주의적 문제의식

한서린 ( Suh Reen Han ) 영미문학연구회 2010 안과 밖 Vol.0 No.29