워즈워스와 근대적 기획: 『경계인들』을 중심으로

유선무 ( Son Moo Ryu ) 영미문학연구회 2006 영미문학연구 Vol.10 No.-

Wordsworth`s internal relation to the "modern project" has been oversimplified as an evasion of politics. However, against the anonymous modern sociality that smothers meaningful political action, Wordsworth actively participates in the construction of a public space which would secure human rights and provide possibilities for human freedom. Critics who think of political modernism only in terms of rationalism have regarded the evocation of community in Wordsworth as reactionary or nostalgic. Yet we need to think of the Wordsworthian community as an outcome of his participation in the modern political project. Through a radical reinvention of the past, Wordsworth attempts to reconcile the European modern project with a British radical culture. In France, the lack of radical culture always let people resort to a mythic present as a powerful revolutionary rhetoric. By contrast, the long radical tradition of dissent in England, with the notion of recognized birthrights of "free-born" Englishmen, made it imperative for British revolutionaries to evoke an "ancient constitution," the presumed system of national, political, and cultural values, whenever they wanted to challenge them. Accordingly, the revolutionary rhetoric of Britain translates natural rights theory and its basic political rationalism into a hybrid form of constitutionalism modified by natural rights theory. The Borderers is an attempt to criticize the optimistic modern belief in the independence of the mind and its individualistic ontology by alerting us to its repressive and violent aspects. The distance Wordsworth places between Rivers, who represents an agent of the individualistic modern project, and Mortimer, who is split between Rivers`s individualism and Herbert`s communitarianism, reveals the poet`s bordering state in relation to the "modern project." Wordsworth criticizes the individualistic and rationalistic elements in the modern project while still upholding the modern political values of freedom and solidarity. In so doing, he promotes a deeply social understanding of selfhood which establishes a connection between the vocabulary of agency and autonomy, and the vocabulary of sociability. He charts a road that modernity could have taken, one characterized by a sensitive attention to alterity on the one hand and a communitarian commitment to communal bonds on the other. Eventually, the Wordsworthian community resists the myth of a transparent society and always produces self-conscious critiques of its own reifying tendencies. Despite The Borderers`s marginal status in Wordsworth`s oeuvre, its commitment to the modern project is Wordsworth`s life-long preoccupation and determines the nature of Wordsworthian imagination, which is a strategically deployed reaction to the cultural and social crisis of the Romantic period.

신유물론 시대의 문학 읽기

유선무 ( Ryu Son-moo ) 영미문학연구회 2020 안과 밖 Vol.0 No.48

This essay aims to examine the recent revival of materialist ontology, known as new materialism, and to evaluate its role in invigorating the literary studies and critical theory. In its attempt to explore materiality and physicality beyond the linguistic turn and social constructionist frameworks, this critical trend tries to overcome anthropocentrism and natural-culture dualism supposedly inherent in the previous critical theory. Correctly claiming that “matter” has been an underexplored question, new materialists call our attention to matter's agential, formative, and self-organizing power. However, in a parallel way in which some constructivists collapse all material into language, some radical new materialists are committing an error of collapsing all language into materiality. Karen Barad's notion of co-constitutive “intra-actions” between cognition and matter is an attempt to move beyond the constructivist-new materialist impasse, which will contribute to open up a new line of investigation more attuned to the affective, critical, and semi-autonomous power of a literary text. The future of literary studies, viewed from the new materialist perspective, depends not only on how matter does things with us but how we do things with matter. Granted that matter retains obstinate opacity, human ethics and epistemology is not something we can easily get rid of. Literature enables us to become equipped with more, not less, “response-ability,” curbing human arrogance which makes man think that he can freely endow agential power on non-human entities and that he can occupy a completely neutral position among things without his human ethical and epistemological biases.

숭고의 역사에서 트라우마의 역사로: 워즈워스의 『서곡』읽기

유선무 ( Son Moo Ryu ) 영미문학연구회 2015 안과 밖 Vol.0 No.38

This essay is yet another attempt to reread Wordsworth’s representation of history by drawing on the recent advances in trauma theory. While Wordsworth has often been accused of eliding history by substituting its material elements with aestheticized sublime moments of imagination, this essay claims that The Prelude shifts from a sublime approach to history to a traumatized one. The shift represents Wordsworth’s exploration of the complex and problematic relationships among memory, trauma, and writing. These issues are also prominent in a recent ethical turn in historiography concerning the role of historians who must heed to the memories of survivors, with an awareness of how the remembrance of the past is sometimes repressed, distorted, and exaggerated. Wordsworth contributes to these debates by providing a model of empathetic representation that bridges the site of individual trauma with a collective form of historical trauma. This model challenges the linear and progressive model of history that calls for dialogical interaction between past and present.

국가, 제국, 그리고 가지 않은 길 조지 엘리엇의 국가론

유선무 ( Son Moo Ryu ) 영미문학연구회 2012 안과 밖 Vol.0 No.32

We witness the erosion of the political dominance of the nation-stale under the strain of forces such as globalizaton, ethnic strifes, and identity politics within and without the nation. The status of the nation-state as the dominant form of collective identity, however, has been questioned since its inception in the modern period due to its illusory and false claim on universalism, which masks its logic of antagonism. Cosmopolitanism, on the other hand, has been suggested as a viable and alternative political project in a volatile relationship to nationalism. Against the backdrop of British imperialism, the violent incarnation of exclusive nationalism which contradicts the democratic legitimation of nation-building process, Daniel Deronda by George Eliot ruminates on the relation between cosmopolitanism and nationalism, promoting the supplementary relationship between the two; nationalism provides well-defined cultural, historical, and political contexts for cosmopolitanism, while the latter functions as the regulative idea for the former, destablizing the (inter)national boundary cut across citizens and non-citizens. The civic nationalism, as opposed to the organic nationalism, is promoted in the process with its emphasis on democratic and humanistic principles. The novel suggests that the vitality of civic nationalism will rejuvenate the national community, counteracting unstable conditions of modernity with it emphasis on exchange value, amoralism, and sheer will to power described in the English part. A crucial novelistic intervention is the replacement of individualistic social contract with communitarian trust as a key trope for the nation-formation. The novel also suggests dialogic and reflective relations to different forms of affiliation, so that the logic of antagonism remains visible and can be renegotiated in a case-by-case basis. Despite the novel`s idealism, the nolvel`s theory of the nation-state is relevant enough to challenge us to rethink the role of nation-state in the world of neo-liberalism and imagine a nation without nationalism.

역사의 담론 속에 다시 태어난 영문학 -유명숙 『역사로서의 영문학-탈문학을 넘어서』(창비 2009)-

유선무 ( Son Moo Ryu ) 영미문학연구회 2009 안과 밖 Vol.0 No.27

코울리지의 대화시: 공론장의 대화의 윤리

유선무 ( Ryu Son Moo ) 영미문학연구회 2008 안과 밖 Vol.0 No.24

메리 셸리의『최후의 인간』 -역사 끝에 선 환대

유선무 ( Son Moo Ryu ) 한국영어영문학회 2012 영어 영문학 Vol.58 No.1

The decades after the French Revolution witnessed the prolific production and consumption of apocalyptic literature, tinged with the optimistic vision of political progress and human perfectibility. However, the Romantic writers were cautious to embrace the idea of the end of history, even though it promised an aesthetic space relieved of historical determinants. Mary Shelley`s The Last Man joined this line of Romantic literature which skeptically questions the millenarian desires of political apocalypse by representing apocalypse without millenium. Using the theme of apocalypse as a tool to investigate the place of human beings in the universe and to test diverse political reform ideas to their fullest potential, the novel diagnoses the ideas of representative political subject as the most problematic aspect of political structure. The notion of subjecthood presupposes a political decision as to who can be counted as subject and this decision, according to the novel, assumed a subject that is" active, free, conscious and willful sovereign,"which Raymond embodies in his exemplary body. Against the sovereignty of Raymond is juxtaposed the subaltern subject such as Sybil. The resistance of Sybil to Apollo, another exemplary subject, is the subtext of the novel, which guides the way out of the grim future of humanity. While the plague exemplifies the universalizing ideal with its principle of sovereignty, Sybil and her descendent Lionel practice the unconditional hospitality so that they can renew the community in a way to embrace singularities of individuals.

『무명의 주드』의 주체론: "되기"의 비극성

유선무 ( Son Moo Ryu ) 한국근대영미소설학회 2011 근대 영미소설 Vol.18 No.3

This paper argues that Jude the Obscure makes a timely criticism of the Victorian notion of "Buildung," by undermining the autonomous liberal subject and its cultural belief of detachment. By situating the human subject in erroneous relation with the physicality of body and more erroneous relation with the partiality of consciousness, Hardy exposes the dominant social, cultural and ideological forces working at the center of subjectivity. The text reveals that being a subject is being subjected, especially subjecting the singular desire of individuals to the "proper" desire of the society. Nevertheless, the text hints at the potentiality for alternative subjectivity within the very singular desires of individuals, which the social and cultural mechanism attempts to domesticate. Jude`s refusal to be inserted in the subject-construction process and his life of constant "becoming" bears witness to the birth of new subjectivity. Jude`s life, however, is tragic because, despite of his resistance to what seems similar to the poststructural construction of human identity, he cannot find a way out of this logocentric vision of the subject. Alternative subjectivity is only hinted at in the constant "becoming" of Jude, which resonates with "individuation without a subject" Deleuze admires so much in Hardy`s novels. This equivocation results from Hardy`s awareness that a move beyond the dualistic conceptual constraints and the perversely monological mental habit is anything but easy. Nevertheless, Hardy`s last novel gives readers a chance to experience the Deleuzian subject in a way to open the potential to reactivate the differences domesticated by the fixed structures of society and representation.

존 클레어의 본향 찾기의 시학

유선무(Son-Moo Ryu) 19세기영어권문학회 2018 19세기 영어권 문학 Vol.22 No.1

This paper examines John Clare’s sense of place, refuting the traditional reading of Clare as a Schillerian “naive poet” whose descriptive poetics unselfconsciously erases the distance between the poetic subject and nature. Far from considering nature as an original, stable site of unity and identity, Clare looks to nature as a place of difference. Clare describes nature not as a comfortable place of belonging but as a discontinuous place, where both human and non-human subjects are exposed to the elemental and the hostile. Nevertheless, his detailed observation of non-human subjects helps him learn their art of dwelling that transforms displacement into a sense of belonging. He practices this art of dwelling in order to cope with displaced modern existence so that human subjects can resist the alienating power of modernism without being rigid or exclusive to others. His unique notion of home destabilizes the rigid boundary between the familiar and the strange and between presence and absence. Eventually, he presents the idea that we are “homeless at home,” which he regards as a condition for happy coexistence on earth. This notion of “being homeless at home” allows us to reflect on our contemporary situation by opening our home-place to the unexpected and the uncanny.

논문 : 셸리와 담론정치-『개혁에 대한 철학적 고찰』을 중심으로

유선무 ( Son Moo Ryu ) 한국영어영문학회 2010 영어 영문학 Vol.56 No.2