도리스 레씽의 『다섯째 아이』 : “행복한 가족”의 몰락

최선령 ( Sun Ryoung Choi ) 한국현대영미소설학회 2006 현대영미소설 Vol.13 No.2

20세기 초 교양소설의 두 갈래: 토마스 만과 조이스의 경우

최선령 ( Sun Ryoung Choi ) 영미문학연구회 2003 안과 밖 Vol.14 No.-

「표 주세요」의 "거친 로맨스"에 담긴 의미

최선령 ( Sun Ryoung Choi ) 한국로렌스학회 2009 D.H. 로렌스 연구 Vol.17 No.2

As often in Lawrence`s fiction, the man and woman relationship explored in "Tickets, Please," one of the war-time short stories can be more richly understood in the context of his view on the crisis of human relationship in capitalist modern age. Even if the settings obviously reflect the first world war`s impacts and the characters` love relationship really takes a form of battle in "Tickets, Please," the frame of battle between man and woman may unduly restrict the implications of this story. Rather "Tickets, Please" can be read as an exploration of a modern man and woman relationship with both dangerous recklessness and liberative vitality that the Midlands tram car also stands for. The revenge of the girl conductors against their elusive lover, John Thomas, is put into a dilemma because their "wild romance" aboard the tram car relies on their "dash and recklessness" and his very elusiveness itself as well. In some sense, the romance between Annie, one of the girl conductors and the heroin of this story and John Thomas has a liberative power that they are supposed to explore and substantiate. But John Thomas and Annie just typically perform the conventional romantic love which the narrator parodies in the fairground scene by the insertion of many "of course`s" and "after all`s." Likewise, Annie`s will to revenge for his betrayal as well as her assurance of his love is an old and ineffectual response to his liberative and reckless love. As the girls` Bacchante-like attack subtlely intrigued with physical desire for John Thomas approaches the highest peak, and when John Thomas finally chooses Annie with full malice and violently confirms his male power, Annie finds herself in a kind of cul-de-sac. "Something" that "was broken in her" is the contradictory logic of the "certain wild romance" she and the conductor girls have involved in. Presenting an analogy between the violent liberating rush of the tram car and the adventurous romance of the conductor girls, "Tickets, Please" explores a new relationship between men and women who live and love as "shipmates aboard this careering vessel of a tram-car" in modern age. Now that the liberative and reckless power of their romance also corresponds to the ambivalence of modernity, the significance of this peculiar romance represented in "Tickets, Please" cannot be overemphasized.

“지성의 실패”와 “자기만의 방” : 레씽의 『19호실로』에 관하여

최선령(Sun-Ryoung Choi) 신영어영문학회 2010 신영어영문학 Vol.45 No.-

This paper examines the theme of woman's retreat to “a room of one's own”, with emphasis on the imbalance between intelligence and feeling, in Doris Lessing's “To Room Nineteen”. Since Virginia Woolf highlighted the importance of “a room of one's own” as an indispensable condition conductive to women's writing of fiction in the early twenties century, the desire and demand for “a room of one's own” as an independent space of refuge and creation has greatly increased. Nonetheless, the aloneness or oneness in “a room of one's own” both reflects and results in a withdrawal from human relationships or action, an addiction to reverie, and sometimes a “suicidal vulnerability” as Elaine Showalter points out. Presenting itself as a story about “a failure in intelligence”, “To Room Nineteen” represents the ontological and epistemological fragmentation of a middle class heroine who ceaselessly tries to reason about the predicaments of her “intelligent” marriage life but ultimately fails. The significance of this story lies on its unique combination of two relevant narratives, the imbalance between intelligence and feeling, and the preponderance of “a room of one's own” which had a tilt to neurosis or withdrawal symptoms in the mid-twenties century European feminism discourses.

『마사 퀘스트』의 곤경 : 1차 대전의 상처와 “분리 원칙”에 사로잡힌 현대적 공동체의 위기

최선령(Choi Sun-Ryoung) 새한영어영문학회 2010 새한영어영문학 Vol.52 No.4

This paper studies Martha Quest focusing on the heroine’s desperate struggle for a new community. Martha is a sensitive and precocious English girl growing in a southern African country. With a painful sense of estrangement and frustration, she finds herself and the world only through books. To begin with, this paper defenses the heroine’s strange passivity and inertia that have frequently been criticized as a flaw in characterization since the publication of this novel, and explains how deeply it is influenced by her father’s “fatal lethargy”. He left England with a trauma from the participation in World War I and came to Africa, but he was still fettered by the old European ideologies. In a sense, Martha takes over her father’s failure in the reconciliation between self and society, as well as “the morbid strain”. But by virtue of her imaginative and intelligent power, Martha catches an impressive vision of “a noble city” where people live harmoniously with no discrimination. It may be regarded as an idealistic innocent vision of a teenage girl. Nevertheless, by intuitively reflecting that there can exist no community without a mechanism of exclusion, Martha’s vision has something more than just a sheer ideal. Of course, the accomplishment of her vision is another question not only because she lives in a split community where “the principle of separateness” dominates, but because she cannot easily overcome her own inveterate inertia. Thus Martha Quest presents the passionate vision of an ideal community and leaves it rarely accomplished or even attempted; however, this unique balance between vision and anti-vision is more convincing and persuasive in the whole context of this novel.

베씨 헤드의 『비구름이 모일 때』가 개척한 "미래를 향한 새로운 길"

최선령 ( Sun Ryoung Choi ) 영미문학연구회 2015 영미문학연구 Vol.28 No.-

Even though the novel as a genre was associated with the rise of European bourgeoisie and the development of modem capitalism which led to the European colonializalion of Africa, many postcolonial African writers chose the novel as the most resourceful genre 10 assert their independence from European cultural domination. Bessie Head, a nonwhite South African woman novelist, also defined her work as recording ````whatever hopeful trend .. she found in reality to shape the future that will be free from "exploitation, slavery and oppression". Head left South Africa under Ap3rthcid and wrote all her major novels in exile in Botswana. Her first novel. When Rain Clouds Gather. explores an utopia where the black people achieve financial independence by means of advanced agricultural techniques and management, free themselves from political oppression, and finally recover their human dignity. Despite its utopian ending, When Rain Clouds Guther averts the danger of utopianism by setting itself in a rather exceptional small village of Botswana and interposing a comic relief. The hero``s shift from violent resistance movement 10 commitment to agriculture indicates that Head is critical of "all the hate-making political ideologies" and violence which evemual1y lead to the subject`s inner devastation, and refuses to subordinate individuality to collectivity. This novel is insightful in its suggestion that the violence against evil cannot be a true solution because evil recurs inevitably and systemically in modern society. This view has something in common with the contemporary argument about "systemic violence" by Slavoj Zizek. In When Rain Clouds Gather. the liberation from the oppressor comes not from violence, but rrom civil disobedience and silent occupation.

교양소설의 위기와 『무명의 주드』(Jude the Obscure)

최선령 ( Sun Ryoung Choi ) 영미문학연구회 2003 영미문학연구 Vol.4 No.-

As the ripening inner contradictions of the modern world are more forcibly felt posing a serious threat to one`s harmonious self-realization within it, the European Bildungsroman of the mid-19th century confronts a crisis and in the course of it, changes into the anti-Bildungsroman. This new tendency repudiates or puts into serious doubt the central ideas of the Bildungsroman, i.e., youth, maturity, and reconciliation, as shown in the representative cases of Sentimental Education (1869) and Jude the Obscure (1895). These two works, however, are significantly different from each other. Sentimental Education, whose protagonist tries to protract his youth, substitutes an imaginary self-realization for real maturity, which means a complete annulment of the historical significance of the Bildungsroman. Jude the Obscure also bears witness to the impossibility of reconciliation, but it keeps to the Bildungsroman tradition more obstinately. It thoroughly examines the possibility of self-realization and reconciliation within the given society, permitting no easy comfort to, nor escape from the painful reality. More importantly, Jude the Obscure gives a glimpse of another, freer community beyond the established order of life, even beyond the ideal bourgeois one upon which the rise and development of the Bildungsroman wholly depends. Even so, Thomas Hardy, with his pessimistic view of life, could not really break a new path toward a creative overcoming of this historical genre, and this undertaking was left to another writer, D. H. Lawrence.

「영국, 나의 영국이여」의 서사기법과 딜레땅띠즘(dilettantism)의 주제 : 에그버트(Egbert)의 형상화를 중심으로

최선령 ( Sun Ryoung Choi ) 한국로렌스학회 2005 D.H. 로렌스 연구 Vol.13 No.1

로렌스의 「섬을 사랑한 사람」 -세 번째 에피소드를 중심으로 읽기

최선령 ( Sun Ryoung Choi ) 영미문학연구회 2013 영미문학연구 Vol.25 No.-

This paper proposes to examine the hero`s extreme search for the absolute isolation in "The Man Who Loved Islands" as an antithesis of "active life" which, according to Hannah Arendt, modernity approved as a supreme means for truth and knowledge. In his own small islands, Cathcart, the hero, first explores the possibility of an epitomized human society operated by his own "personality", and after its failure, becomes only involved in the relationship with a woman. However, with disillusionment from the experimental society and human relationships, his withdrawal from the world drastically accelerates into an absolute isolation in the third island. It is noticeable and noteworthy as well that the narrator`s attitude toward Cathcart which have been tinged with occasional ruthless ironies in the first two episodes changes in this third episode. Now, the narrator just shows the readers what Cathcart does and thinks making them see the world the same way as the hero does. This significant change in the narrative tone implies that to some extent, the narrator is also sympathetic to Cathcart`s desire for the isolation that was partly triggered by the realization of the negativity and futileness of modern "active life". Nevertheless, the hero`s search for the isolation is finally converged into pure self-assertion or self-expansion. This limits the other possible adventure which Cathcart`s search for the absolute isolation could lead to, that is, the achievement of do-nothingness or Buddhistic emptiness. Even though his freedom from all human desires, his complete uninterestedness in anything exterior, and his vivid realization of natural universe could have enabled him to achieve it, it was just out of Lawrentian scope.

교양소설(Bildungsroman)의 종언과 진 리스의 『어둠속의 항해』

최선령(Choi, Sun Ryoung) 한국외국어대학교 외국문학연구소 2020 외국문학연구 Vol.- No.77

이 논문은 진 리스의 초기 대표작이자 반교양소설인 『어둠속의 항해』가 어떤 방식으로 교양소설 장르를 부정하고 회의하고 있는지를 고찰하려는 시도이다. 이 작품의 주인공인 애나는 16살의 나이에 카리브해로부터 영국에 건너와 하층계급으로서 살아가지만 코러스걸로서 성공도 이루지 못하고 월터와의 남녀관계에도 실패한다. 이 작품의 배경인 20세기 초반 유럽 사회는 돈이 지배하고 사회적 유동성이 급감함으로써 개인과 사회 양자의 상호 양보에 기반한 교양소설적 “화해”의 가능성은 거의 사라진 세계였고, 애나의 전체적 경험은 이러한 사실을 증명하는 것이다. 이처럼 20세기 초반의 현실에서 개인의 진정한 성숙이 지극히 힘든 일이 되었다는 사실 자체는 이미 19세기 중반 이후부터 확인된 바이지만 『어둠속의 항해』의 의의는 단지 이를 재확인하는 데 그치는 것이 아니라 그 과정에서 사회와 인간관계에 대한 특유의 도발적인 시각을 드러낸다는 데 있다. 애나는 타락한 사회의 희생자이면서도 동시에 스스로 그 일부를 구성한다는 사실 역시 인식하고 인정하는 모습을 보이는데, 이를 통해 『어둠속의 항해』는 전통적으로 교양소설이 전제해온 개인과 사회의 이분법이 더 이상 유효하지 않음을 시사한다. 한편 애나는 비루한 현실을 외면하고 상상이나 환상의 세계 속에서의 충족감을 추구하는 방식을 택하지 않으며 이는 반교양소설로서의 『어둠속의 항해』가 지닌 중요한 특징이자 미덕이기도 하다. 더불어 이 작품은 전통적으로 교양소설적 성숙과 “화해”의 상징이었던 남녀관계와 결혼에 관해 급진적인 비판을 가함으로써 이에 관한 한층 근본적인 사유를 촉구하는 성과를 내기도 했다. This paper aims to examine the way in which Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark dismantles the genre of bildungsroman. Anna, the protagonist of the novel, moves from the Caribbean to England at an earlier age and lives as a lower class woman, failing in her love as well as in her profession as a chorus girl. Her case demonstrates that in a world where money dominates and social mobility has been greatly reduced, he reconciliation by mutual concessions between individual and society has become almost impossible. The achievement of Voyage in the Dark, however, lies not just in its confirmation that bildungsroman based on the modern European society is no longer valid, but in its challenging perception and analysis of the society and its human relationships. The novel indicates that the dichotomy between individual and society is untenable and provides a radical critique of the ideal of marriage or man-woman relationship which has traditionally been a symbol of maturity and reconciliation in the modern European bildungsroman.