포스트모던 시학의 난해함 다시 읽기: 프레드릭 제임슨의 밥 펄먼론을 중심으로

정은귀 ( Eun Gwi Chung ) 영미문학연구회 2008 영미문학연구 Vol.14 No.-

Frederic Jameson, in his 1984 essay, "Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," devotes a short section to Bob Perelman`s poem "China." His reading becomes famous for two reasons to poetry critics: first, successfully marking cultural features of late capitalist society at the nexus of artistic modes, second, doing it based on his rather reductive reading of Perelman`s poem and providing us with a wide range of criticism for depthlessness of postmodern poetics. Beginning with overall complaints and misgivings on postmodern poetics and revisiting Jamesonian reading of Perelman, this essay aims at articulating the achievements and limits of Jamesonian reading and then exploring how to read avant-garde postmodern poetics, especially practiced by Language poetry movement. It argues that postmodern poetics proposed by the movement is a response to the condition of the world, rather than its symptom. As a way of rethinking difficulty in postmodern poetics, this essay does not attempt a comprehensive ordering of the conceptual chaos around the notion of difficulty. Rather, while following the logic of Jameson`s Perelman reading, it draws the inner landscape of postmodern poetics and analyzes its distinctive textual mode. My purpose, therefore, is not to argue against the orthodox understanding of postmodern culture drawn by Jameson but to argue around it, to fray the edges of its necessarily codified image embedded in the process of poetry reading practice. Trying to reinfuse the discussion on the methodology of postmodern poetics, I engage most directly with Jameson`s reading of Perelman and then weave around the issues connected with difficulty of postmodern poetry: fragmentation, parataxis or new sentence, and the methodology of poetry reading. In short, this essay begins with revisiting those vertiginous feelings of being unable to read and understand poetry in this era, to represent the artifact from the reality, or to construct a communicative community in the name of poetry. And finally it ends with collaging/collating my concern with "cultural poetics" that is just about to burgeon from the debris of cultural studies and invites readers to rethink of the political and theoretical implications of the postmodern experimental poetics.

“응답하라” 휘트먼 -조락(凋落)한『풀잎』의 잎사귀를 다시 읽는 일

정은귀 ( Eun Gwi Chung ) 영미문학연구회 2013 안과 밖 Vol.0 No.34

Throughout his life, Walt Whitman tried to make one perfect volume of Leaves of Grass, which explains his lifelong efforts for its revision. With the endless revision process, he carefully saw to the crcation of the author and public, historical figure called “Walt Whitman,” the origin of modern poetry, While the long history of Whitman criticism has been busy accommodating Leaves of Grass, the 1881 author edition, for every new-born theory, the revision process of Leaves of Grass and its effects have not garnered significant attention of equal measure to that of literary theories, This essay, as a way of re-positioning Whitiman in his own era, politics, and culture, goes back to the process of revision and re-reads “Respondez!,” one of the greatest poems of Whitman, which became a fallen leaf. Firstly appearing in the 11856 edition of Leaves of Grass, finally disappearing in the 1881 author-edition as it was divided into two short poems “Reversals” and “Transpositions,” “Respondez!” needs to be reevaluated as one of the most significant achievements in Whitman``s poetry. In “Respondez! (The Poem of the Propositions of Nakedness)” Whitman``s poetry. In “Respondez! (The Poem of the Propositions of Nakedness)” Whitman attempts to resolve the political and cultural crisis of visionary democracy. Linking the political failure of America with the collapse of a rational order, the poet relocates the individuals and the nation in a transposed imaginative frame. In the form of endless repetitive enumeration and cataloging where the vibrant power of negativity governs the whole lines, the throes of democracy that appeared to have lost its direction at that time are vividly dramatized. In “Reversals” and “Transpositions,” the revised versions of “Respondez!” however, the vibrant power of the long original poem loses its force in a shortened form. While the original poem addresses directly the political, cultural landscape of his time and tears away the veils of the present crisi exposing the naked truth of American democracy, the two poems suppress the blistering and sarcastic honesty. Evaluating the three poems, this paper cautiously concludes the revision process of “Respondez!” proves that Whitman succumbed to the expectations of readers. Highlighting the artistic achievement and importance of the fallen leaves in Leaves of Grass, this paper invites readers to rethink how a poet is born in and out of his time and his text.

논문 : 생태시의 윤리와 관계의 시학 -메리 올리버의 다른 몸 되기

정은귀 ( Eun Gwi Chung ) 한국영어영문학회 2010 영어 영문학 Vol.56 No.1

땅의 사람들, 대지의 언어 -고정희와 조이 하조의 또 하나의 생태시학

정은귀 ( Eun Gwi Chung ) 국제비교한국학회 2011 비교한국학 Comparative Korean Studies Vol.19 No.2

본 논문은 그간 고정희 비평사에서 간과되었던 생태시학적 관점에서 고정희 시의 현재적 의미를 새롭게 읽어내고자 한다. 『지리산의 봄』과 『뱀사골에서 온 편지』를 중심으로 땅, 대지, 그 안의 사람들에 주목하는 본 논문은, 그간 주로 탈식민주의나 페미니즘 관점에서 진행되었던 고정희 시 읽기의 지평을 넓히기 위한 시도인 동시에 지금 시대 시의 실천적 자리를 묻는 작업이기도 하다. 이를 위해 아메리카 인디언 시인으로 고정희와 비슷한 문제의식을 지닌 조이 하조의 시를 함께 읽는데, 이 두 시인은 모두 땅에 기대 살아가는 사람들, 특히 자기 목소리와 자신의 몫을 갖지 못한 채 살아가는 소외된 자들의 가려진 목소리를 대지에 밀착된 언어에 담아내고자 했다. 이 두 시인에게 땅은 곧 땅 위에 깃든 사람들에 대한 사랑의 의미를 가지며 시 쓰기는 그 사랑을 언어라는 형식을 빌어 담아내는 적극적인 정치적 실천의 방식이었다. 고정희와 조이 하조의 시에서 드러나는 땅과 사람들, 대지와 언어의 길항 관계는 시인들이 각자 경험한 식민 상황에서의 남다른 문제의식을 땅과 대지에 대한 지극한 관심 안에 담아냈다는 점이 기존 생태시학의 주된 흐름과는 다른 방식으로 문제적이다. 이들에게는 기존 생태시학이 몰두한 자연 대 문명의 대립보다는 근대의 남성적 지배질서에 반하는 감각적 체험의 중요성이 궁극에는 보살핌과 품어냄의 시선 속에서 빛나고 있다. 언어적 측면에서도 난해한 형식미를 추구하기보다는 일상적인 구어를 동원하는 이들 두 시인의 시 작업은 남성 시인들이 주도한 주류 생태시학과는 다른 방식의 혁명성을 선취하고 있는데, 그것은 아마 땅의 사람들과 대지의 언어를 그리는 여성 시인 특유의 섬세한 돌봄의 마음, 곧 사랑이 깃든 언어에서 길어 올릴 수 있는 희망이 아닌가 한다. 현실에 대한 비판적 사유에 기초한 이들의 여성적 시 쓰기가 궁구해 온 길이 詩라는 미적 형식을 통해 이 시대의 새로운 정치성을 실현하고 있다는 점이 흥미롭다. As a way of reevaluating Goh Jung Hee`s poetry and the nature of its feminine voice twenty years after her death, this paper revisits a few poetry books of Goh from Tears Blossom (1986), Spring at Jiri Mountain (1987), to A Letter from Bamsagol (1991) within the context of ecopoetics, which has long been neglected in the history of Goh Jung Hee criticism. In the process of highlighting the importance and possibility of ecopoetics through Goh Jung Hee`s poems, this paper reads the poems of Joy Harjo, a contemporary American Indian poet, who shares a similar interest, yearning, and love for the people of land and earth`s language. Though rooted in different cultures, histories, and languages, Goh and Harjo`s poems about common people and the land are undeniably linked to the stark reality of people whose voices are hidden in the long history of deprivation. Their poems, when re-evaluated from the angle of ecopoetics, are problematic and revolutionary in the sense that people`s separation from the earth and the loss of their original claim for the land are regained and recaptured in their poetic strategies to reconstruct the relations between the land and people in the eyes of caring, embracing, and nursing. In those languages of caring and nursing, in the enduring process of waiting and loving, their poems reach another level of ecopoetics, successfully performing the politics of aesthetic form beyond critical thinking of reality and history.

“다수로 존재하기”: 조지 오펜과 공적 공간으로서의 시

정은귀(Eun-Gwi Chung) 한국아메리카학회 2018 美國學論集 Vol.50 No.3

This essay, as a part of a long-held project on the relationship between poetry and its public value, re-interprets Oppen’s “Of Being Numerous” as the voices echoing the communal value of poetry against the grain of modern poetry that has been attacked as being trapped in the over-indulgence of subjective ‘I’ in the lyric poetry. Revisiting “Of Being Numerous,” sequence poems composed of forty section in the poetry collection under the same title, this essay argues that Oppen’s approach to a dark world of the city New York leads readers to affirm a fundamental, partially knowable world as the space of the singular-plural beings in ‘sad wonder.’ His poetry, featuring its flows of clear and succinct language, stands as correlatives of our own everyday experience which will open up to us an intuition of seeing more clearly the mode of our beings in this world. “Of Being Numerous” is the pantheon of his poetry, a successful experiment of his poetic vision, in which we readers, of being singular and being numerous, can reach the communal ground beyond different temperaments through the gaze of ‘the first eyes.’

치유 인문학의 가능성 : 앤 섹스턴, 최승자, 몸의 시학

정은귀 ( Chung Eun-gwi ) 국제비교한국학회 2018 비교한국학 Comparative Korean Studies Vol.26 No.2

본 논문은 영미시와 한국시의 비교연구의 일환으로 ‘몸의 시학’의 관점에서 앤 섹스턴과 최승자의 시를 함께 읽으면서 ‘치유 인문학’의 새로운 가능성을 탐색하고자 한다. 그 과정에서 사적인 개인의 경험을 토로하는 것으로 해석되는 ‘고백’이 실은 당대 사회와 역사를 향하여 공적 감각을 일깨우는 적극적인 역할을 한다는 것을 주장한다. 이러한 시도는 문학의 문화정치학적 지평을 넓히고자 하는 문제의식에서 출발하며, 이 두 여성 시인이 문학장 내에서 공히 주류 비평의 장으로부터 혹은 담론 생성과정에서 일정한 소외를 이겨내면서 개인의 상처 입은 몸의 고통과 죽음 충동을 어떻게 시로서 이겨내고자 했는지 밝히는 방향으로 나아갈 것이다. 이러한 비교 읽기를 통해서 ‘힐링’의 방식으로 수동적으로 소비되는 치유 인문학의 자리에 시 쓰기와 시 읽기가 적극적인 실천 행위로써 재배치될 수 있는 가능성, 나아가 혐오와 경쟁이 만연하는 지금 여기의 삶에 시가 어떤 역할을 할 수 있는지, 시를 통한 공적 감각의 회복은 어떻게 가능한지를 탐색하면서 치유 인문학의 새로운 가능성을 찾고자 한다. This paper invites Anne Sexton and Choi Seung-ja into the realm of a comparative studies focusing on poetics of the body and explores new possibilities of clinical humanities. I would propose that both poets, while applying confession as their writing strategy, go beyond the limit of confessional poetry that has been criticized as the form of representing private experience and easily falls into the net of excessive subjectivity. These two poets, though having been situated in rather distant locations in different poetic traditions and acceptances, construct the site of poetry writing and reading against the grains of death drive and transform their personal experiences into an alternative space of clinical humanities where public sensibility is newly explored.

증언과 시의 언어: 뮤리얼 루카이저의『사자(死者)의 서(書)』읽기

정은귀 ( Eun Gwi Chung ) 영미문학연구회 2014 영미문학연구 Vol.26 No.-

Following so many years of neglect, Muriel Rukeyser`s The Book of the Dead has recently been the subject of critical attention. In order to reassess her poetics which has not been fully appreciated by literary critics, this essay recaptures The Book of the Dead, a series of twenty poems, from the perspective of poetics of testimony. Originally published as a chapter of U.S. 1, Rukeyser`s second book of poems, The Book of the Dead is based on the Hawk`s Nest incident, the worst industrial disaster of America that happened in West Virginia in the early 1930s. Full of testimony with historical materials and documents about the incident, The Book of the Dead failed to garner enough critical attention with somewhat political and unpoetic mood. I argue that Rukeyser`s attempts to weave the incident as an experimental poem in the form of testimony let the dead testify to the tragic incident in their own voices. As the combined form of legal testimony, documentation, conversation, lyric songs, etc, The Book of the Dead successfully marks the forgotten spot of history. By exploring the ways in which Rukeyser maps the American landscape at her own time, I demonstrate how she forges poetic paths that connect disparate historical, social, and literary fields.

여성 서사와 시의 정치: 뮤리얼 루카이저의 『사자의 서』다시 읽기

정은귀 ( Eun-gwi Chung ) 한국영미문학페미니즘학회 2016 영미문학페미니즘 Vol.24 No.2

Susan Friedman`s essay on the long poem invites us to rethink its uneasy position within the generic grid of genres in poetry and to reinterpret the epic tradition in modern poetics. Taking four strategies of ironist, historicist, re-visionist, or experimentalist, Friedman excavates modern female poets from H. D. to Loy, Ostriker, Grahn, and Warland and explains how they successfully feminize the masculine-codes of the epic genre. This paper, at once sharing her position to feminize the phallic code of the epic genre, goes against the grain of the critic methodology that proposes the woman`s long poems take the form of feminizing the epic genre. Rather, by revisiting Muriel Rukeyser`s The Book of the Dead in terms of female narrative and the politics of poetry, this essay argues that Rukeyser successfully reworks modern epic conventions and composes a national elegy and narrative of modern America. Reading The Book of the Dead as a woman`s American epic is to relocate Rukeyser who was erased in the literary history for a long time in the landscape of modern poetics. In the process of remapping the American epic tradition, this essay focuses on the relationships between gender and genres, between poetry and politics, between voices and truth. Beginning with the questions embedded in the nature of genres, unmixed and mixed, my reading probes Muriel Rukeyser`s quest to construct a woman`s American epic in the male-centered literary tradition and concludes that her serial poems in The Book of the Dead offer us the chance to re-envision a genre that questions the long-standing tenets about the long poem, literary tradition, and poetic authority.

추락하는 몸,슬픔의 포르노그래피 -9,11과 재현,시의 실험

정은귀 ( Eun Gwi Chung ) 영미문학연구회 2012 안과 밖 Vol.0 No.33

Though the question of whether9?11 represents a culture rupture remains open, post-9?11 poetry invites readers to rethink of the nature of representation and the function of poetry. This paper, briefly mapping out the literary and cultural scenes in the post 9?11 era, tries to see the possible impossibility of poetic discourse in the era when poetry has long and largely been neglected in the making of public discourse. Especially focusing on the image of the falling bodies and the pornography of grief created by the media this paper asks the ethics of mourning in such a political and cultural crisis. When the media tried to sustain the grief and anger, making the dead the objects of pornographic gazin and inviting readers to join in the endless festival of weeping and peeping as insatiable consumers, post-9?11 poems responded to the unprecedentedly traumatic event in various ways, from reflecting the political and historical context of 9?11 to finding ethical words of mourning and comforting. The various explorations of poetic language, drawing a new literary landscape of post 9?11 America, have taken the alternative space of politics when the cultural and political discourses were swayed by such illogical rhetorics as sacred ground, heroes, the axis of evil, the fallen Babel, etc. In a sense, 9?11, the first historic world event, is still waiting for its literary and cultural interpretations and more than 10 years after 9?11, it``s not yet clear what literature after 9?11 will be. The questions and voices raised by poets in post-9?11 era, however, become a meaningful endeavor to rescue American culture from the debris of death, and thus to construct the space of literature that carefully deliberates on the road of democracy amid anger, rage, and danger.

루이즈 글릭과 서정시의 귀환 : 입장료 1달러 시의 수행성을 다시 생각하며

정은귀 ( Chung Eun-gwi ) 영미문학연구회 2021 안과 밖 Vol.- No.50

This essay has two-fold objects; at once revisiting the critical discourse on lyric poetry of 20th century after Theodor Adorno’s famous passage, “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” it examines the meaning of Louise Glück’s lyric voices within the backdrop of contemporary culture. Arguing that the importance of Glück’s lyric poetry has been overlooked through misunderstanding on the lyric, this paper invites readers to rethink the key elements of lyric poetry in its use of the ordinary language, the presence of lyric subjects, the way of representing loss and creating sympathy, and thus the value of performativity of a poem whose entry fee is not high, different from representative poems of High Modernism. In the fissure where both the lyric and the poetry of Glück have been disregarded, this essay will ask the value of the disciplined lyric born in stilled time. Furthermore, it proposes that the public value of the lyric are constituted in its singular, descending movements against the grain of the contemporary culture where the excessive empathy and the discourse on healing are overflowing.