Virginia Woolf`s Figures of Loss

( Kelly S. Walsh ) 한국근대영미소설학회 2016 근대 영미소설 Vol.23 No.1

Virginia Woolf’s poetics of loss has long been recognized for its contradictory qualities, which make her elegiac works so singular, vital, and open-ended. Her “fiction-elegies” mourn for losses that are past and those that may come to pass; they register the “blows” of loss, both individual and collective, and aesthetically shape them; they use loss as a creative spur in the effort to overcome it and achieve some sort of wholeness. While this complex “grief work” is self-avowedly inconclusive, the consolations partial and temporary, there are, I contend, important, if equally provisional, triumphs at the level of style, through what I am calling Woolf’s figure-language of loss. Words will never be sufficient to recover what has been lost; however, by marshalling tropes, like metaphor and metonymy, imagery and anthropomorphism, into “companies,” Woolf’s figure-language, in intensified moments, pierces through the “cotton wool” of the “conventions of sorrow” and their prescribed forms and meanings. Throughout her major novels, these singular figure-languages both reopen wounds and feelingly contour our thoughts, such that, figuratively, we share in a more authentic response. Consoling and anti-consolatory, the force of this language lies in its capacity to wound, while provoking us to face loss openly, mindfully, and inventively.

“What a Difference a Tail Makes”: Woolf, Modernism, Feminist Posthumanism

( Kelly S Walsh ) 한국영미문학페미니즘학회 2019 영미문학페미니즘 Vol.27 No.1

In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf’s narrator, luncheoning with university fellows, spies a Manx cat and registers a lack in the conversation around her, a difference in the sound of voices, and speculates on the different kinds of poetry men and women might have hummed at parties prior to World War I. Finding the thought “ludicrous,” she explains her laughter by pointing to the tailless cat, thinking: “It is a queer animal, quaint rather than beautiful. It is strange what a difference a tail makes.” The “strangeness” of this “difference,” I argue, reflects the deep, intricate entanglement of human and nonhuman in Woolf’s feminist thinking, which decenters patriarchal, humanist epistemologies and de-essentializes gender and other identity categories. Woolf’s complex notion of androgyny, then, may be productively revisited from a posthumanist perspective, for her modernist anthropomorphisms subvert the will to dominate, universalize and hierarchize, inherent in anthropocentric thinking. Ultimately, her staging of new, less anthropocentric relations between human and nonhuman, “thinking of things in themselves,” generates a form of critique that denaturalizes hierarchy, affirms difference, and invites collaboration to create a world where the woman writer “shall find it possible to live and write her poetry.”

Figures of Citizen: Claudia Rankine’s Lyricism and Rhetoric

( Kelly S. Walsh ) 한국영미문학페미니즘학회 2018 영미문학페미니즘 Vol.26 No.1

In Claudia Rankine’s award-winning collage poem, Citizen: An American Lyric (2014), I argue, the ongoing, inconclusive labor of registering and resisting racial and patriarchal hierarchies entails a complex formalism. The text, that is, asserts the persistence of what Caroline Levine calls “constraining forms” and makes insistent, lyrical appeals for the shaping of new, less harmful ones. To fully appreciate the political and ethical force of this modern-day, African-American lyric, I also contend, it is necessary to attend to the specifically literary dimensions of Rankine’s formalism, the manner in which her figures, tropes, and other rhetorical devices simultaneously politicize and personalize poetics. Employing such techniques as a second-person poetic voice, intertextual engagement with the lyric tradition, shifting linguistic registers, and metafigurality, Citizen discloses the material, somatic imprints of microaggression and a history of racial oppression on the black “citizen.” This formalism, then, imaginatively exploits the forms that inevitably shape reality, and produce racist and sexist stereotypes, to generate affect and provoke reflection, a persuasive strategy for inducing readers, especially white ones, to relinquish pernicious myths of American innocence and literary dreams of transcendence.

Complex Pastoralism in an Age of Technological Transformation: Jean Toomer’s Cane and the Poetics of Racial Untranslatability

( Kelly Walsh ) 미국소설학회(구 한국호손학회) 2021 미국소설 Vol.28 No.1

Jean Toomer’s Cane has long been recognized as a singular work of American modernism, mixing prose, lyric poetry, black spirituals, and drama to forge an aesthetic search for African American self-realization. In staging the failure of black characters to achieve this by rooting themselves in the soil and rustic life of Georgia, I argue, Cane enacts a complex pastoralism, which focalizes the dissonant and pervasive doubleness of black life in an age of technological transformation. With bifurcations that include African and American, past and present, rural and urban, South and North, black vernacular speech and standardized English writing, Toomer ironizes and racializes the longing for an unspoiled Arcadia that might redress the insufficiencies of the present. In the face of the racialized forces of modernization and industrialization, which threaten to translate black consciousness and aspirations into a single idiom, Toomer insists on a writing that maintains intimate contact with the contradictions and particularities of black life, forging complexities that resist translation and subvert unexamined American myths of exceptionalism and progress. Ultimately, African American self-realization remains unachieved in Cane; its complex pastoralism reveals this open-ended project requires inventively affirming the antitheses of modern black life, defiantly asserting its singularity and untranslatability.

이중언어작가 혼돈의 조율 -베케트, 워드싯 그리고 형식의 이슈들

( Kelly S Walsh ) 한국비교문학회 2013 比較文學 Vol.0 No.59

조르주 뒤뛰 (Georges Duthuit) 와의 대화에서 사무엘 베케트는 그의 예술적 정언명령이 표현할 대상도, 수단도 없으며, 표현의 가능성이나 힘도 욕망도 없이, 표현해야할 의무와 더불어 지속되는 어떤 것으로 묘사하고 있다. 주요 작품들을 불어로 쓴 아일랜드 태생의 베케트는 자신의 작품을 추후 영어로 번역하며 모국어와 고국을 스스로 박탈함과 동시에 강박적으로 그것으로 회귀하고자 하는 경향을 보여준다. 이러한 미적 감수성과 작품의 이중적 존재와 더불어 그는 자신의 것이자 자신의 것이 아니기도 한 독특하고, 낯선 미지의 목소리를 창출해낸다. 따라서 우리가 그의 작품을 모던하고 트랜스내셔널하다고 말할 때, 그것은 바로 그러한 특성이 패러독스이자 아포리임을 받아들이는 것을 의미한다. 요컨대 그의 주인공들은 점점 한갖 글쓰는 목소리들로 격하되어, 마침 그들이 언어와 의미의 혼돈 속에 빠져있을 때에 뿌리상실과 이해불가능성의 첨예한 감각을 표현하는 것이다. 그러한 목소리들이 무관심으로부터 벗어나고자 혼돈을 조율하려 시도하고 또 실패하면서, 그것들은 불가피하게 - 문법 속의 신과 더불어, 의미를 부여할 종결에 대한 믿음이 없는 - 하나의 긴 문장임이 드러난다. <무(無)를 위한 텍스트들> 과 <어떤가요> 와 같은 작품들은 무능과 실패의 독특하고 역동적인 미학을 실행시키면 서구문명의 잔해와 화석으로부터 일관된 정체성을 형성하는 일의 실패들을 그리고 있다. 완성되지도 종결되지도, 그렇다고 무(無)를 성취하지도 못하면서 목소리들은 결국에는 그것들을 지지하는 혼돈에 더 많은 워드싯을 더하면서 지속된다. 이러한 패러독스에서 베케트가 이끌어내는 결코 잠재울 수 없을 듯한 에너지를 통해 우리는 단지 혼돈 속에 머무는 것에서 어떤 고통스러운 감동과 찬탄을 발견하게 된다.

Seeing with Borrowed Eyes: Joyce and Keats in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road

( Kelly S. Walsh ) 미국소설학회 2016 미국소설 Vol.23 No.1

“The ugly fact,” said Cormac McCarthy in an interview, “is books are made out of books.” For several decades, critics have been seeking out the specific intertextual sources that abound in McCarthy’s works, with Melville, Faulkner, and Hemingway considered to be his closest forebears. In the case of The Road, critics have identified a number of romantic and modernist intertexts; no one, however, has investigated the role that Keats’s odes and Joyce’s Ulysses play in McCarthy’s novel, the reason being, presumably, that its engagement with the works of the romantic poet and modernist novelist is not a matter of direct influence or “similar poetics.” Instead, as I argue, McCarthy’s narrative “reads” these works of Anglo-Irish romanticism and modernism and actively works to decontextualize and critically rearticulate fragments of their aesthetic visions. This process reveals profound ambivalence and irresolvable tension: Keats and Joyce are incapable of meeting the demands of the novel’s post-apocalyptic wasteland, yet McCarthy’s own literary vision is measurably conditioned by these predecessors. In momentarily borrowing their “eyes” at heightened junctures of the novel, McCarthy stylistically forges ways of seeing that both intensify the atmosphere of melancholic despair and proffer a small measure of resistance amidst a “world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities.”

Bridging Disappointment: Pak T’aewo˘n’s Kubo and James Joyce’s Ulysses

( Kelly S. Walsh ) 서울대학교 규장각한국학연구원 2012 Seoul journal of Korean studies Vol.25 No.1

Although Pak T’aewo˘n expressed his appreciation for Ulysses and the “experimental nature of James Joyce’s writing” in a 1934 article, there have been relatively few critical attempts to bridge his 1934 novella, A Day in the Life of Kubo the Novelist (Soso˘lga Kubo Ssi u˘ i iril), and Joyce’s 1922 epic modernist novel. And most of these have been limited to discussions of their diurnal structures and the motif of the urban wanderer, or flaneur, in the modern colonial city. So while Pak does not emulate Ulysses’s radical formal experiments, I argue that his Kubo does reveal a kindred sensibility in its portrait of the artist as a young man struggling to find, amidst a seemingly infertile 1930s Seoul, “happiness,” or, in Stephen Dedalus’s terms, something like “the word known to all men.” To varying degrees, the search for it remains inconclusive in both modernist texts; nevertheless, much as Joyce does in Ulysses, Pak offers an affirmative vision in the tentative moment of his intelligent and sensitive hero from excessive solipsism towards authentic empathy for others. And in both texts, the development of a greater capacity to respect and affirm the other in her or his singularity is intimately allied with a reconceived relationship to the mother. Kubo’s odyssey thus reaches its apparently hopeful conclusion when he understands, as if for the first time, sadness and suffering in a lonely widow and “ignorant” barmaids. Unlike Stephen, who continues to grieve for his dead mother, paralyzed to a great extent by his guilt, Kubo realizes the opportunity to return home and comfort the mother who, with her “infinite love,” waits for him, night after night, sleepless and worried. And as he hastens home, determined to “write a truly good novel,” it seems that Kubo may have found a means to revitalize his life and his art. That is, much as Stephen Dedalus is an ironized, literary portrait of a younger James Joyce, Pak suggests that Kubo the novelist, equipped with the (self-)awareness and empathy lacking for much of the day, will now be able to write a story much like the one he has been the principle character of.

Strange Rhetoric, Enigmatical Grammar, Poetic Logic: Wallace Stevens`s The Auroras of Autumn

( Kelly S. Walsh ) 한국영어영문학회 2015 영어 영문학 Vol.61 No.2

The recent turn in Stevens criticism has largely been phenomenological in nature, concerned with moving past the poet’s “failure” to overcome the epistemological problem of the relation of mind and world, imagination and reality, and thereby realize the “supreme fiction.” While many of these critics, who tend to focus on Stevens’s later poetry, have interpreted the effects of grammar or rhetoric in isolation, there has not been a satisfactory account of their complex interplay, which, at heightened junctures, realizes a multidimensional poetic world simultaneously constituted by seeing, interpreting, and feeling. My intervention, then, is pedagogical in inflection. I make the case that Stevens’s efforts in the later poetry to move beyond epistemology can be productively put in relation to the classical liberal arts trivium of grammar, rhetoric, and logic. But pedagogical, too, in the sense that these poems self-consciously teach us to read differently, to be attentive to the richness, vitality, and subtlety of rhetoric and grammar, which, in their active interpenetration, create a poetic logic of their own.one that takes us beyond empirical truth, beyond the types of truths religion has traditionally proffered humankind. In resisting “the intelligence / Almost successfully,” in continually framing and unframing phenomenal reality, the “endlessly elaborating” dance of grammar and rhetoric ultimately discloses the extent to which we share in the making of the logic of the poem.

Eating on the Insane Root

Kelly S. Walsh 한국셰익스피어학회 2011 셰익스피어 비평 Vol.47 No.2

At the conclusion of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the entrance of Macduff, bearing Macbeth’s severed head on a pike, sets off mirthful celebration. Evil, it seems, has been mercilessly punished and all that had been foul in Scotland is now fair. There is, however, something excessive and incongruous about this gruesome thing, the sightless head that was Macbeth’s, juxtaposed against the optimism of the victors. For us, who have watched Macbeth’s precipitous rise and decline, we find scant comfort in the synecdotal assassination of a man who saw so deeply and intensely into an abyss of horrors. The profound ambivalence-a complex affect mingling revulsion, desire, terror, and regret-we experience in witnessing Macbeth’s precipitous rise and fall, I believe, can be accounted for by synthesizing Sigmund Freud’s notion of the uncanny and theories of the sublime put forth by such figures as Immanuel Kant, and Edmund Burke. Macbeth’s persistent and strange power, then, emerges from its awareness of a compulsion to unearth the “old and long familiar” (what Freud would later deem “the uncanny”), as well as its poetic power to intimate the infinite, the unknowable, the unthinkable-that is, the sublime. In the end, we are left to ponder the greatness of Macbeth’s visionary capacity, the uncanniness that transforms “horrible imaginings” into all-too-real deeds, and the utterly compelling staging of evil that, through a man who dared to eat “on the insane root,” signals towards an infinite, untotalizable whole that overflows the mind’s capacity to grasp it.

Finitude, Death, and Play in Faulkner`s As I Lay Dying

( Kelly S Walsh ) 미국소설학회(구 한국호손학회) 2012 미국소설 Vol.19 No.2

In his self-proclaimed tour de force, As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner reveals death to be a transformative force, one that, in its very opacity, constitutes a source of inconclusive and potentially endless mental play. Self-consciously aware that the human mind will never succeed in bridging the caesura between life and death, his novel nevertheless seeks to exhaust itself in attempting the venture. These confrontations between the human imagination and finitude rearticulate (the thinking of) living and dying as near-infinite play, while rendering death just as strange and remote as ever and closure just as elusive. And forced to think using a language in which "words dont ever fit even what they are trying to say at," the irrepressible human desire for wholeness and self-knowledge, along with the attempt to recuperate loss, is perpetually frustrated. Ultimately, Faulkner`s play is reflective of, or analogous to, Derrida`s notion of it, but without the "joyous affirmation" the philosopher draws from it. This play promises, as long as there are words, to defer transcendence or an overcoming that would reveal the limits of our finite condition. In As I Lay Dying, then, Faulkner conveys the suspicion that what remains of our capacity to reinvent the world might very well be play; nevertheless, as his example testifies, the ever-failing search for truth, origin, and plenitude will continue, interminably.