The Ending Taken for "Wonder"

Young Seon Won(원영선) 한국셰익스피어학회 2009 셰익스피어 비평 Vol.45 No.3

기독교적 섭리 개념과 드라마 장르로서의 희극 개념을 동일한 논의 안에서 묶어내는 작업은 무모해 보일 수 있다. 그러나 일견 무관해 보이는 이 두 개념은 현세의 삶에 존재하는 우연과 역경, 그리고 인간의 영역 밖에 존재하는 것처럼 보이는 운명의 불가해한 이치에 인간적인 질서와 의미를 부여하려는 인간의 염원을 담아낸다는 점에서 근본적인 공통점을 지닌다. 특히, 희극에 재현 된 섭리를 살펴보는 일은, 행복한 결말을 향해 나아가는 극적 전개를 매개하는 이중의 동인과 그러한 동인 뒤에 숨겨진 희극적 정신을 새롭게 검토할 수 있도록 하는 흥미로운 시각을 제공한다. 이 논문은 따라서 셰익스피어의 희극 『십이야』에 나타난 섭리 개념과 희극적 결말의 상관관계를 살펴봄으로써 궁극적으로는 그것이 인간의 자유의지를 긍정하고 재확인하는 셰익스피어의 희극 정신을 드러내주는 극적 장치이자 철학적 기반임을 밝히고자 한다. “낙하하는 참새의 모습에 조차 신의 섭리가 깃들여 있다”는 유명한 햄릿의 대사에서 자주 거론되는 바와 같이, 신의 섭리에 대한 종교적, 철학적 해석은 캘빈을 위시한 당대인들의 주요 관심사 중 하나였다. 특히 신의 부름을 받은 선지자임을 자처하는 청교도들을 둘러싼 논쟁과 비판은 그들이 말하는 신의 섭리에 대한 다양한 관심과 해석을 낳는다. 셰익스피어 극에 나타난 섭리 개념은 바로 이러한 당대의 논쟁을 반영하는 동시에 작가 나름의 재해석과 견해를 보여주는 장치라 할 수 있다. 예컨대, 집사 말볼리오의 우스꽝스럽고 자기중심적인 섭리 개념이 당대 청교도인들에 대한 풍자와 기계적인 섭리관을 보여준다면, 바이올라의 “다정한 폭풍”과 “새로이 사랑에 빠진 바다”의 대사에서 드러나는 것은 포용과 용서, 그리고 사랑을 가르치는 자비로운 섭리관이다. 본 논의에서는 특히, 당대의 섭리관을 설명하는 l차 동인과 2차 동인의 개념을 검토하고, 나아가 그것이 이 작품 속에서 등장인물들의 운명, 선택, 깨달음을 매개하는 방식을 논의한다. 또한 작품 전편에 걸쳐 반복적으로 나타나는 성서적비유를 작품의 결말-특히, 두 쌍둥이의 정체가 밝혀지는 장면에 그려진 ‘현현’의 순간과 연관지어 살펴봄으로써, 운명과 개인의 선택 사이를 매개하는 섭리의 의미와 그것을 담아내는 희극적 형식의 상관관계를 밝힌다. ‘다정하다’고 묘사된 폭풍은 등장인물을 한 곳에 불러들인 섭리의 2차 동인이지만, 헌신과 믿음을 통해 ‘새로운 사랑’을 만들어낸 것은 이 극의 이야기를 이끌어온 네 남녀이다. 따라서 인간의 노력과 선택을 긍정하는 동시에 그것을 이끌어내는 섭리에 대한 경이와 감탄을 아울러 극화하는 극의 결말은, 종교적이면서도 동시에 지극히 인간적인 셰익스피어의 희극 정신을 가장 잘 보여주는 ‘경이로운 결말’인 것이다.

탈식민주의 · 생태 역사의 인류세적 서사화: 아미타브 고쉬의 『헝그리 타이드』

원영선(Young Seon Won) 19세기영어권문학회 2021 19세기 영어권 문학 Vol.25 No.2

Proposed originally as a geological term for an epoch, the Anthropocene now encapsulates the constellation of the ecological and planetary crises that humans face today. As its name (Anthropos/Cene) indicates, it tells us that humans have been profoundly disrupting the ecology of the planet earth which is now on the threshold of a series of unpredictable, catastrophic events precipitated by changes in the earth system. The idea of human beings as a planetary force thus raises fundamental questions about the anthropogenic dichotomies of man/nature, the human/nonhuman, subject/object, and human/planetary time. Literature, with its Cartesian roots, likewise faces the ontological and epistemological challenges of the Anthropocene, and is in need of new literary ways to represent Anthropocenic plights. Whether or not today’s literary forms can embrace such challenges is still an extended, open question; thus, Amitav Ghosh diagnoses the current state of literature as “the Great Derangement.” With the grounding question of how literary forms can cope with “the Great Derangement” of our age, this essay attempts to investigate how Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide engages with major issues of the Anthropocene. The essay argues that the novel’s multi-layered narrative structure reflects, and correlates with, its underlying thematic concerns, in its self-reflective interweaving of different entanglements between the human and nonhuman protagonists, between human and geoclimatological planetary history, and between the local and the global. The term “the aesthetics of entanglements” is coined to indicate the structural and thematic echoing of the novel’s narrative ways to raise such Anthropocene questions, as it epitomizes how the motif of entanglement seeps through the plurality of human and nonhuman narratives, enabling, in Ghosh’s phrasing, “unthinkable” encounters with the other-than-human to be “telescoped in such a way as to permit the telling of a story.”

"다시읽기" 이야기: 제인 오스틴의 『설득』에 나타난 독서행위

원영선 ( Young Seon Won ) 한국18세기영문학회 2008 18세기영문학 Vol.5 No.1

Reading is one of the major topics that Jane Austen persistently explores throughout her literary career. In Austen`s novels, characters` reading is rendered in parallel with their reading of life experiences, and this same parallel is repeatedly evoked to raise awareness of Austen`s readers, not only about their act of reading but also about their cultural and literary expectations. Austen, in Persuasion, takes up the topic afresh and introduces the new idea of `rereading` in order to interrogate the implications of the reader`s life experience (which lies between different acts of reading) in an act of reading. Focusing on the reading process that fuses diverse standpoints, this study seeks to explain the complex ways in which Anne Elliot, the heroine of the novel, accommodates her various rereading(s) into her deep and enlarged perception of people and life. Reading Anne`s (re)reading against Sir Walter`s Quixotic reading and the contemporary cultural discourse of reading at the same time, and mapping out the multiple layers of Anne`s reading process by which Anne accommodates the diverse dimensions of time, space, and a variety of cultural and literary discourses, this paper argues that reading is an act of crossing-over in its overcoming of the epistemological and discursive barriers that confine the reader`s reading and life experiences. Reading through the scenes that exemplify Austen`s notion of rereading, the paper proceeds to the conclusion that Jane Austen`s writing of her novels and her telling stories of reading(s) are an act of relating herself to the larger cultural field where her representation of reading becomes a part of the cultural forces that serve to refashion the new views of reading in her time.

자연과학과 인문학의 만남 인류세 연구

원영선 ( Won Young Seon ) 영미문학연구회 2019 안과 밖 Vol.0 No.46

Even a glimpse at its origin and the context of its coinage testifies how dramatic it has been for the term ‘Anthropocene’ to make its first appearance and quickly loom large on the horizon both in academic and popular discourses. Beginning with Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen’s first suggestion, it took only ten years until ICS (the International Commission on Stratigraphy) made a suggestion to critically consider the case for the Anthropocene as a formal epoch, and less than a decade before the term came into the mainstream academia. The scholarly attention drawn to it was also well beyond natural sciences; social science and humanities studies almost immediately took it up into their discussions. Dipesh Chakrabarty was one of the first among those who responded to its intellectual challenges, and his pioneering discussions on the epistemological and ontological challenges that the Anthropocene raises for humanities studies have triggered the wide range of criticisms and counter-criticisms. Originally suggested as a geological notion that humans (Anthropos) as a geophysical force have exerted planetary influences upon earth to change the earth system and thus open a new planetary epoch(Cene), the Anthropocene now epitomizes the current constellation of environmental/planetary crises, generating a variety of discussions about the idea of ecology, climate change, the human, the nonhuman, and deep time. Only a beginning as it has been, last couple of years also witnessed the first surge in the Anthropocene literary studies. And the fundamental questions that the Anthropocene evokes led literary scholars to re-examine literature’s capacities and parameters to re-think and re-present Anthropogenic crises today. Though aiming foremost to look into the Antrhopocene in English studies, this study thus first tries to examine the notion within its original conception and the consequent debates around it, and then moves to the major controversies over the notion and its ‘human’ implications, finally coming to inspect the general inclinations of ‘literary’ Anthropocene(s) and their specific outcomes.

하이베리 탐구: 제인 오스틴의 『엠마』

원영선(Young Seon Won) 19세기영어권문학회 2016 19세기 영어권 문학 Vol.20 No.1

Jane Austen’s Emma presents fewer ‘speaking’ characters than any of other novels, and its entire action is confined to a single, almost parochial, place, Highbury. The novel’s such peculiarities seem to make it fit into the author’s famous recipe of her subject, “3 or 4 families in a country village.” The centrality of Higbury in the novel, however, does not merely stem from its role as a country village-setting in which a few main characters’ story unfolds; the novel oddly persuades the readers that Highbury is bustle with people crisscrossing the boundaries of class, status, and space, thus fashioning itself after Britain Island in Austen’s time. Focusing on the two minor characters, Mr. Perry the apothecary and Miss Bates, instead of the main characters, this study attempts to explore Highbury in its ways to crystallize both Austen’s experiment with a workable communal society and her representation of the contemporary society. Highbury’s social and human network, with Mr. Perry and Miss Bates at its center, operates to contain both class mobility and inter-class communication, while at the same time showing itself on its way to face new changes to be part of larger circuits in contemporary England. Rather unusual with its close reading of the two minor characters in their social and narrative positions as it is, the essay does not look into the issues involved in the novel’s main plot and characters, although it briefly touches on Highbury’s historical future in relation to Austen’s later depiction of the ‘speculation’ town in Sanditon.

『그들의 눈은 신을 보고 있었네』에 나타난 여주인공의 성취와 서사적 성취

원영선(Young seon Won) 서울여자대학교 인문과학연구소 2016 인문논총 Vol.30 No.-

앨리스 워커(Alice Walker)가 버려진 무덤을 찾아 비명을 세운 상징적 사건을 시작으로, 조라 닐 허스턴(Zora Neale Hurston)은 긴 세월의 비평적 무관심을 뒤로 하고 미국 문학의 정전작가로 자리매김한다. 1970년대와 80년대를 거치며 허스턴의 생애와 작품에 대한 연구 또한 양적으로나 질적으로 증가해 왔으며, 그 중에서도 그녀의 대표작 『그들의 눈은 신을 보고 있었네』(Their Eyes Were Watching God)은 허스턴 연구에서 핵심적 부분을 차지한다. 본 연구는 본격적인 작품론에 앞서 허스틴 비평의 변천, 특히 허스틴에 대한 당대 할렘 르네상스 지식인들과 문인들의 혹독한 비평과 이후 (흑인) 페미니즘 비평가들을 중심으로 한 재평가를 비교함으로써, 그러한 허스틴 비평 내부에 복잡하게 얽혀있는 인종정치적, 젠더정치적 작동 기제를 검토한다. 할렘 르네상스 지식인들과 문인들이 추구했던 미국 흑인의 삶에 대한 문학적 재현이나 진정한 흑인상을 비껴가는 허스턴의 독특한 문학세계는, 흑인 여성의 눈으로 미국 흑인의 삶을 들여다 보되, 한 편으로는 인종과 젠더가 얽혀 작동하는 흑인 공동체 내부의 이중적 모순을, 다른 한 편으로는 그들의 풍성한 문화 유산과 건강성을 가감 없이 그려낸다는 점에서 현대 흑인(여성) 문학의 백미라 할만하다. 『그들의 눈』의 작품 논의는 세 번의 결혼과 귀향으로 이루어진 여주인공 제니(Janie)의 ‘퀘스트’(quest)를 중심으로 이루어지며, 제니의 꿈과 좌절이 당대의 인종과 젠더의 사회, 역사적 문맥과 뗄 수 없는 관계에 놓여있음을 확인하는 과정으로 구성된다. 작품에 구현된 제니의 여정은, 제니의 할머니 네니(Nanny)가 흑인 여성의 운명을 진단하고 예언한 표현, “세상의 노새”를 세 남편과의 관계 속에서 체험하고, 극복하는 과정이다. “노새”의 운명을 극복해 가는 제니의 여정은 낭만적 남녀관계의 꿈을 극복함으로써 이룬 독립과 자존감 뿐 아니라, 자신의 삶을 이야기로 전달하는 서사적 성취에 의해 완성된다. 제니가 자신의 인생담을 친구 피비(Pheoby)에게 들려주는 형식으로 이루어진 소설의 서사틀은 이야기에 감화되고 성장하는 피비를 통해 제니가 이룬 서사적 힘의 상관물이자, 허스튼이 제니를 통해 흑인 여성의 이야기를 독자들에게 전달하는 서사문학적 행위이다. Begining with Alice Walker’s monumental disvovery of Zora Neale Hurston, a diverse range of scholars have followed Walker’s path, probing into the cultural and literary shift that made such a talented writer fall into oblivion, and reclamining her name in literary history. The 1970s and 1980s saw a great revival of Hurston studies, and today Hurston has become the author who is most frequent on the reading list for undergraduate students in the U. S. As it is, the shift in Hurston’s literary reputation is a marker for the decades-long controversies over Afro-American identities and their relation to gender politics. Looking first into the Harlem Renaissance writers’ responses to Their Eyes Were Watching God, therefore, this study attempts to relocate the ways in which the contemporary racial and gender politics were involved in criticism of Hurston’s work, and futher connect them to Hurston’s nonconforming representation of Afro-American lives in the novel. The reading of the novel focuses on questions concerning the nature of Janie’s quest in the context of the contemporary racial and gender order, investigating how her grandmother Nanny’s ‘prophetic’ view of the black women’s fate, “de mule uh de world,” is dramatized and then subverted in (and out of) Janie’s three marriages. Janie subverts Nanny’s ‘prophecy,’ this study argues, not merely because she symbolically and physically kills her hustands to realize self-sufficiency and independence, but because her act of narration (and non-narration/willed silence) empowers her to reach and thus affect those who are willing to listen to her story. Janie’s narrative empowerment that the novel envisions is analogously in parallel with Hurston’s own narrative power in framing the double narrative structure in that Hurston fashions Janie’s story within her storytelling, inviting readers to listen to her/Janie’s story(telling) with Pheoby as well.

미완성작의 재발견: 제인 오스틴의 『왓슨 가 사람들』

원영선 ( Young Seon Won ) 한국영미문화학회 2016 영미문화 Vol.16 No.3

Jane Austen’s fragment, The Watsons, has received very little critical attention as a literary work, even less than Austen’s another fragment, Sanditon, phenomenon of which is more apparent in recent Austen studies. The central issues that most of critics have raised about the fragment revolve around the question of why it was left unfinished, a question which has been mostly discussed in the author’s biographical context, thereby not going further to fully appreciate the fragment’s literary value. Unfinished as it is, however, The Watsons calls for minutely-tuned reading in its own as it requires a new critical approach in its relation to Austen’s sustained interest in women’s problematic relation to their society’s demand. Looking beyond the previous study’s homologous views that either biological or aesthetic problems prevent the author from resuming the fragment, this study thus re-opens the old issues with a new question: how and why Austen made herself felt in her narrative distance from the heroine, Emma Watson. If Emma is ‘too good,’ as critics have argued, it is not because Austen is too close to her heroine, losing her narrative control; it is rather because Austen invites the reader into Emma’s self-reflective moral sensibility through which the reader is made to see how the social norms of propriety lead her to be too refined and too good at once.

새롭게 읽는 제인 오스틴의 『쎈스와 쎈서빌리티』 -서사구조와 독자 문제-

원영선 ( Won Young Seon ) 영미문학연구회 2008 안과 밖 Vol.0 No.25

Empowered Women: Paradoxical Dynamics of Self-denying Submission in Victorian Female Characters

원영선 ( Young Seon Won ) 근대 영미소설 학회 2008 근대 영미소설 Vol.15 No.1

새뮤얼 존슨과 "돈키호테" 의 후예들

원영선 ( Young Seon Won ) 한국18세기영문학회 2011 18세기영문학 Vol.8 No.1

It is no coincidence that early modern England witnessed a "surprising concentration of interest" in Quixote for it was a literary and cultural trope, by and through which contemporaries reinscribed their self-consciousness as modern readers. As diverse as they were, modern critics have read in Eighteenth-century Quixotes conflicting stories about contemporary readers` self-consciousness, while at the same time underscoring the way in which they reflected and mediated the period`s prescriptive discourse of reading. And Samuel Johnson, a literary icon of the contemporary`s anti-novel discourse, has served to highlight modern critics` overriding view of diverse voices in English Quixotes. Examining Johnson`s notion of human desires and illusionary hopes in The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, therefore, this study attempts to locates him, along with the writers such as Charlotte Lennox and Jane Austen, within a cultural history of English Quixotes who were then on their way to refashioning themselves. Johnson`s idea of human desire and hope stems from his profound understanding of the paradoxical nature inherent within an individual reader`s Quixotic projection of his/her desire, which is also found in the discursive battles that English Quixotes fought for their new identity as modern readers.