바흐찐의 그로테스크 몸 담론을 통한 셰익스피어 극의 (여성주의)문화 유물론적 접근

고석기(Suk-kee Koh) 한국셰익스피어학회 2007 셰익스피어 비평 Vol.43 No.4

'The essential principle of grotesque realism', Bakhtin writes, 'is degradation', but he is also insistent that this degradation is not merely a negative process. On the contrary, Bakhtin stresses the ambivalence of carnival imagery and its use in Rabelais. The degradation enacted in carnival and in carnivalized writing-the incessant reminders that we are all creatures of fresh and thus of fool and faeces also-this degradation is simultaneously an affirmation, for even 'excrement is gay matter', linked to regeneration and renewal. Related to this conception of grotesque realism is distinction hat Bakhtin draws between the 'grotesque body' and the 'classic body'. This is another of his evaluatively charged distinctions, and, like all of his aesthetic preferences, is linked to some of his profoundest philosophical predispositions. Where the body of classical art is an achieved and completed thing, the grotesque body of Rabelais and the kind of art which he represents appears unfinished a thing of buds and sprouts, the orifices evident through which it sucks in and expels the world. The grotesque body celebrated by Bakhtin is a body in which becoming rather than completion is evident, a body whose openness to the world and the future is emphatically symbolized by the consuming maws, pregnant stomachs, evident phalluses and gargantuan evacuations that make it up. Much of the bawdy humour in Romeo Gild Juliet revolves around the grotesque body. The Nurse seems to epitomize Bakhtin's notion of the grotesque, especially in her repeated allusions to copulation, conception, genitalia, and her own body. During the course of the play the Nurse seems to take a vicarious pleasure in anticipating Juliet's sexual encounters. Bakhtin argued that the grotesque mode could be used to counteract or undermine the status of the 'classical', high, or orthodox; it can puncture the gravity and grasp of dominant discourses and ideologies (systems of belief and expression). Applied to the Nurse, we might say that her discourse of sex challenges, and arguably undermines, the idealization of romantic love voiced by Lady Capulet (and indeed Juliet) and the notion that marriage is principally a status issue, voiced by Capulet. While the Capulets mask the presence of sexuality within marriage, the Nurse exposes it. But in the Dream, the ass's head distinguishes itself from comic props and animal masks in general, and becomes part of a complex structural pun, and the lower bodily parts are ennobled. Bottom is not only the bottom of the social hierarchy as the play represents it, but also the 'bottom' of the body when seated, literally the social ass or arse. Shakespeare and his contemporaries took for granted that ass, as the vulgar, dialectical spelling of arse, was the meeting point of a powerful set of linked concepts. Shakespeare used "ass" to pun on the ass that gets beaten with a stick and the arse that gets thumped sexually, the arse that bears or carries in intercourse. In Julius Caesar, the meaning of blood and bleeding becomes part of an insistent rhetoric of bodily conduct in which the bleeding body signifies as a shameful token of uncontrol, as a failure of physical self-mastery particularly associated with woman. The image of blood is interpreted as a trope of gender and the open and bleeding body of Caesar's corpse is associated with feminine blood. The Petrarchan vocabulary Antony deploys in signifying Caesar's corpse, first in the capitol and later in the forum, accedes to the idea of femaleness as a source of Caesar's difference but refigures his body as a discursive site not of contempt or anxiety but of desire.

달과 변신 : 『한여름 밤의 꿈』에 재현된 여성의 성과 정치

고석기(Suk-Kee Koh) 한국셰익스피어학회 2010 셰익스피어 비평 Vol.46 No.4

The action, the imagery and the themes of A Midsummer Night's Dream all revolve around different kinds of change. Change can have the sense of changed affection and of exchange; but it can also have more lyrical connotations of transformation, of changes wrought by magical and mysterious outside forces. This is what Shakespeare extensively explores on other levels of the play, addressing the transmutative powers of dreams, of love, and of the imagination. Such ideas are often articulated in the play through the confusion of the senses. This theme of transformation is also articulated through another kind of allusion: Ovid’s Metamorphoses. This classical work was a kind of comic epic of change. It narrates transformative encounters, especially erotic encounters, between gods and mortals, and presents these events as mythological explanations of changeful phenomena in the natural world. In Ovid’s original Metamorphoses, the passage of time was often denoted by reference to the phases of the moon. This was highly appropriate since the moon itself was a symbol of change, in its passage through monthly cycles culminating in the transition from old moon to new, and in its association with the ebb and flow of the tides. Even more so than the Metamorphoses, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is presided over by this mutable heavenly body. We also see a reason why lunar imagery became increasingly popular for Elizabeth in the 1590s: as she grew older, its cyclical connotations could be used to suggest powers of infinite self-renewal, infinite youthfulness, and even goddess-like immortality. However, these celebrations of Elizabeth’s immunity to change and mortality were of course idealizations, and there is other evidence that as the 1590s progressed she was visibly in decline.

교수대, 혹은 반역의 발판 : 『맥베스』의 교수대 독백

고석기(Suk-kee Koh) 한국셰익스피어학회 2002 셰익스피어 비평 Vol.38 No.2

Recorded in chapbooks, ballads, and state papers, the "scaffold speech" was delivered by prisoners prior to execution, serving as a critical site for the apparent affirmation of the monarch and a re-establishment of communal, public order, as notably argued by Michel Foucault. These speeches were meant to serve a didactic purpose. First, the spectacle of the prisoner on the scaffold instructed the audience to avoid such crime and its gruesome punishment. Second, the prisoner's speech often directly admonished the audience not to engage in criminal activity. Cawdor's scaffold speech within Macbeth thus serve as a warning within a warning, given that English Renaissance theories of tragedy stress the didactic effect of tragedy in cautioning its audience members against crime and tyranny. On one level, Macbeth appears to confirm this exemplary model of tragedy, and indeed the early representations of Cawdor's scaffold speech could be read as a foreshadowing of the events of the play: a hero turns traitor and in dying teaches the audience to avoid his own treachery. But Renaissance tragedy externalizes inward, transgressive desires for all to see, and this simple mechanism of exposure produces complex results in terms of audience reaction and interpretive possibility. As an insightful analysis of the liminal place of the Elizabethan stage demonstrates, the "place of the stage," both geographically, in the liberties of London, and historically, as a newly established site, allows the theatre to examine critically the culture of which it was marginally a part. This paper focuses on Macbeth's oppositional potential by analyzing Cawdor's execution in the opening scenes as a failure of didacticism, both on the state and theatre scaffolds: the exemplary traitor's speech does not instruct Macbeth to avoid treason but potentially offers him a model, a namesake even, for his own criminal desires. Even before Macbeth's treason, then, Duncan's Scotland reveals that hegemonic control is an impossible dream. Not only does Cawdor's execution fail as an educational, hegemonic spectacle, but also, more importantly, the staging of this familiar genre of confession before death complicates the articulation of truth in the play. As a result, the play blends allegedly legitimate sovereignty with treasonous deception, ultimately producing a ruler in Malcolm who combines rather than opposes the knowledge of traitors and monarchs. The play itself shows its two invasions, its two thanes of Cawdor, its two feasts, two doctors, two kings, and two Kingdoms. These mirroring effects insist that the radical difference asserted by its fierce moral oppositions is both tendentious and insecure. As a recent group of critics has argued, apparent oppositions are discovered to be dismayingly similar, and, more dismaying still, even implicated in one another.

『안토니와 클레오파트라』: 사랑의 비극에 나타난 사랑의 담론과 여성의 주체성

고석기(Suk-kee Koh) 한국셰익스피어학회 2003 셰익스피어 비평 Vol.39 No.4

In the love tragedies male friendship and its attendant attitudes toward females take on a progressively greater destructive potential in opposition to heterosexual relationships. The multiple possibilities of comedy are replaced by the limited option of tragedy. Whereas both homosocial and heterosexual bonding may occur in comedy, tragedy demands a choice on the part of the male protagonist between the two. In Romeo and Juliet, Mercutio's casualness and flippancy about sexuality and love, like that of the antiromantics of the comedies, are perhaps defenses against the threat of unhappy love; moreover, as foils to Romeo's romanticism. And in Antony and Cleopatra, the misogyny that is epitomized by Philo and Octavius and the discursive practice of Orientalism conflate, constituting the Roman ideology that dominates the entire known western world. As critics have responded to the play, Rome has traditionally been the winner in the implicit contest between Roman and Egyptian values. Many critics have judged Cleopatra a manipulative and self-serving temptress or femme fatale; some have endorsed the enraged Antony's charge that she is a whore (4.12.15). But recent critical paradigms have made it possible to view the play through more or less Egyptian eyes, celebrating the feminine values exemplified by Cleopatra and the realm in which she reigns. The positive valuation the recent critics give to Cleopatra signals a breakdown of the opposition between Rome and Egypt. Contemporary thinkers show that the either/or logic of binarism is itself a typically "Roman" pattern. This paper shows the way Cleopaatra's "infinite variety" (2.2.277) deconstructs an oppositional logic and explains why her femininity is not the logical opposite of Antony's masculinity but a disruptive counterpart that throws gender norms into question. Understood in these terms, Egypt does not so much contrast with Rome as reveal the limitations of Roman rule.

‘종교로의 회귀’ 담론을 통한 셰익스피어극의 영적, 문화유물론적 접근

고석기(Koh Suk Kee) 새한영어영문학회 2011 새한영어영문학 Vol.53 No.2

The topic of Shakespeare and religion has been visited and revisited many times over the past century. Scholars have examined Shakespeare’s uses of the Scripture and of the official Book of Homilies, as well as his allusions to Christian beliefs and practices in the plays and poems. Recently, as historical scholars have renewed their attention to early modern religion, some have taken a fresh look at Shakespeare’s relation to general and specific issues of Protestant reform, while others have readdressed the topic of Shakespeare’s possible years before his emergence as a player and playwright in London. Shakespeare’s Catholic background and the especially perilous position of Catholics in late Elizabethan and early Jacobean England led him to be especially careful in handling religious issues in his drama―in fact, to resort to forms of ambiguity that marked a real difference between his plays and the more Protestant nationalistic dramas of the time. Shakespeare was keenly aware of contemporary religious doctrinal controversies, but, for whatever reasons (his family’s Catholic background, his political prudence, his scepticism, his wish to appeal to a religiously heterogeneous audience), Shakespeare chose to occlude or blur them. Shakespeare composed both tragedies and tragi-comedies that contain non-satiric expressions of some of the very experiences of the miraculous and wondrous that Protestant polemicists and rationalists were debunking as part of the old religion’s supposed superstition and trickery. In one sense Shakespeare might have been trying to salvage for a post-Catholic English culture some of those emotionally powerful features of medieval Catholicism that broadened the range of religious experience and perception, preserving a sense of the mysteriousness and wondrousness of both the natural and supernatural worlds. All’s Well is clearly not a religious play in the sense that it demonstrates and demands belief in Christian doctrine. The ease with which Helen can slip from citing the Old and New Testaments as God’s ‘weakest minister’ to fusing the pagan lore of pre-Christian Britain with the exotic rites of the ancient world is ample evidence of that. This is not to undermine or understate the spiritual dimension of All’s Well That Ends Well, but rather to redefine its role in the comedy as revolutionary rather than religious.

The Henriad의 폴스태프와 모성의 귀환

고석기(Koh, Suk-Kee) 부산대학교 인문학연구소 1999 코기토 Vol.53 No.-

여성의 부재와 여성성의 전복성

고석기(Koh, Suk-Kee) 부산대학교 인문학연구소 1998 코기토 Vol.52 No.-

셰익스피어극의 여성주의 정신분석비평 연구

고석기(Koh, Suk-Kee) 부산대학교 인문학연구소 1996 코기토 Vol.48 No.-

The Comedy of Errors

고석기(Koh, Suk-kee) 부산대학교 인문학연구소 1995 코기토 Vol.47 No.-

영국 르네상스 무대 위의 욕망 : 『십이야』의 젠더와 성

고석기(Suk-Kee Koh) 한국셰익스피어학회 2001 셰익스피어 비평 Vol.37 No.4

Certainly there have been waves of change in the way that Shakespeare is treated. If we had been writing Shakespeare criticism in the I 970s, we would have been able to assume a general reverence for Shakespeare, and for the sanctity of his texts as stable and identifiable artifacts. There would have been little need to address theoretical or ideological approaches to Shakespeare texts. With the rise of literary theory and cultural studies, within Shakespeare studies there was an uneasy acknowledgement that the texts of Shakespeare might not survive in importance into the twenty-first century. Now, being written in 2000, a different approach again is possible and necessary. A whole new field of criticism is opening up including Shakespeare on film and feminist criticism which, by and large, has mellowed from a polemical mission of reading to the more descriptive 'gender studies', accepting writers like Shakespeare as open to feminist and gay readings. There are obvious homoerotic, same-sex discourses in Shakespeare's works that are an important aspect of the theme of love. But what is significant is that old-fashioned hetero-sexual discourse, as in the early comedies, is freely mingled with homoerotic discourse. And various sexualities, including a strong strain of self-love and chastity, exist comfortably side by side without contradicting one another. It is important to note that the most extensive body of homoerotic discourse is in Shakespeare's Sonnets. On the English Renaissance stage, not only was it possible for various sexualities to exist side by side, but also we can find that the possibility of women becoming men and to a lesser extent men becoming women was a real one for the physiologic consciousness of the Elizabethan, who upon viewing the final scene of Twelth Night saw just how interchangeable sex as well as gender were. This paper suggests that examining Twelfth Night through the lens of lovesickness discourse reveals how love can catalyze subjectivity and overturn normative gender and erotic roles and that marriage assures neither permanent satisfaction nor social harmony. In this play the ending leaves open the possibility that patriarchal marriage and homoerotic attachments can coexist, for neither marriage is represented as quite conventionally gendered or even exclusively heterosexual, as bonds other than marital ones persist and are acknowledged.