“Journey of the Magi”: Retentive Agony of Mind-scape in the Physical and Spiritual Travelogue

장철우 한국T.S.엘리엇학회 2014 T.S. 엘리엇 연구 Vol.24 No.1

In “Journey of the Magi,” T. S. Eliot uses a dramatic monologue to testify to what the magi experience in their physical and spiritual journey towards aspiring new faith. The poet juxtaposes the conventional gospel story and Lancelot Andrewes’s Nativity Sermon of 1622. He describes the magi’s struggles between old dispensation and new dispensation on their way to a spiritual ascending. In addition to severe cold weather and less hospitality of a new place, the magi have to endure the hardship of spiritual journey. This essay examines why the magi’s travelogue about their journey is a bitter memory in terms of spiritual hardship and physical suffering. Magi’s ignorance of the full meaning of the Birth and Death or the Rebirth of Jesus is revealed not only in their hesitant attitude but also in their incomplete liberation from the old values. This essay focuses on the idea that their hesitance may result from a synchronic rather than diachronic meaning of the bitter agony of the Birth. I explore the dual or manifold meanings of agony in an allegorical reading of the lines. I argue that the bitter memory in their journey, the unique amalgamation of the spiritual and physical travelogue, is the inevitable marks to trigger the allegorical agony prevalent in the still point of death and birth.

The Storytelling of Myth: Eliot, Tennyson, and Stevens

장철우 한국T.S.엘리엇학회 2015 T.S. 엘리엇 연구 Vol.25 No.3

T. S. Eliot reviews the value of mythic figure, Ulysses, in his essay, “‘Ulysses,’ Order, and Myth.” This essay explores how mythic method is related with the storytelling of poems based on the mythic figures, since Eliot also uses mythical references in his poems. Homer and Dante deals with the story of Ulysses. Alfred Tennyson and Wallace Stevens also describes Ulysses in their own way. In attempting to recuperate the contemporaneity, this essay highlights certain features Eliot claims in Tennyson’s “Ulysses” and Stevens’s “The Sails of Ulysses.” The story of Ulysses is spoken differently by such different speakers. Storytelling is not mere to tell the story but to crystallize it with the speaker’s experience. Tennyson depicts Ulysses as a hero who seeks knowledge while Stevens emphasizes knowledge itself rather than an adventure for knowledge. Stevens describes Ulysses as a mental traveler, not as an adventurer on voyage. Another example is Penelope who is also portrayed as an artistic thinker. Both of them have different characters from what Homer, Dante, and even Tennyson create in their works. The difference between an ancient character of the hero and the contemporary character in those poems brings about each poet’s contemporaneity.

The Blindness or Disability in Eliot’s Old Men

장철우 한국T.S.엘리엇학회 2020 T.S. 엘리엇 연구 Vol.30 No.3

T. S. Eliot employs the old men characters or their disabilities, impersonalizing their values instead of their infirmity. In his poems, The Waste Land, “Journey of the Magi,” “A Song for Simeon,” the poet illustrates why the old men’s characters are described as the pre-personal or de-personal state even with their deteriorated sensory and cognitive ability. This essay attempts to evaluate the value of the old men’s sensual and physical infirmity in his poetry. The attempt formulates a zone in which both impersonal poetics and the value of disabilities overlap. It gives us an insight into some of the problematics central to interpretations of his poems, for instance, the issue of mythological, biblical, and Dantesque references. Eliot’s attempt is not to express his old men’s disabilities themselves but a creative power of dissociation of the personality.

Elizabeth Bishop’s Poetics: The Fluidity and Mobility of the Interior/the Exterior

장철우 한국현대영미시학회 2014 현대영미시연구 Vol.20 No.2

This essay examines why Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry has a unique value on overcoming the human condition. The past and the present belong together like two sides of the same coin, but in her poems they share their territory with each other by merging and flowing. In Bishop’s works, the fluidity and mobility appear to help in dissolving the boundary between the interior and the exterior. To associate time with travel, Bishop adopts several metaphors such as “map,” “cry,” and “tears” not because of their meanings, but because of their fluidities. When we encounter the strong stimulus of environment, our eyes and noses respond to the stimulus without any emotional pain, sense of frustration and loss of the beloved people. For Bishop, the tears bring about the possibility of rendezvous for the past and the present. The essay focuses on the idea that Bishop breaks down such famous metaphors in her poem. Hence, I argue that her poems reveal her poetic postmodernity in the fluidity of waters by decentering the geographical center both in the landscape and the mindscape.

Equilibrium of Spatial/Temporal Stillness of Dance in Four Quartets

장철우 한국현대영미시학회 2013 현대영미시연구 Vol.19 No.1

In Four Quartets, T. S. Eliot provides a scaffold for time, juxtaposing mobility of stillness and immobility of dance in terms of time. The poet illustrates why time is not chronological by placing the beginning and the end in the same spatio-temporal position. This essay examines how to approach time and why stillness is a pivotal term in Four Quartets. The poet dovetails what the movement has in space with what duration has in time. By virtue of structure of sonata, the analogy Eliot draws in the tile of Four Quartets implies a multiply folded structure of the poem. Creating a new whole, time is at once destroyer and preserver. This essay focuses on the idea that stillness depends on atemporal pattern in order to re-arrange the entire time. I illustrate that only through pattern, stillness shows us its mobility; its mobility belongs to dance. I explore the interrelationship between stillness and dance by describing what dance is in Four Quartets. In general, people consider dance as movement, excluding “pause.” However, for Eliot, dance includes not only movement and but also its pause. I argue that what he defines as a dance contains mobility of stillness and immobility of dance in terms of complete simplicity. In brief, spatio-temporal stillness of dance echoes the qualitative multiplicity of time.

Masquerades of Time in Eliot’s “Preludes”

장철우 한국T.S.엘리엇학회 2019 T.S. 엘리엇 연구 Vol.29 No.2

One of T. S. Eliot’s early poems, “Preludes,” illustrates how an urban street is related to masquerades of human’s soul, which is composed of various images. From evening to morning the fragments of thousand images rebuild a desolate urban life; the poem roughly overarches his entire works. In “Preludes,” the poet attempts to break down the boundary between subject and object or demarcation between personal pronouns. Eliot accomplishes such merges between them and shows us that time past and time future can appear in time present; he is deeply indebted to Henri Bergson for his time concept. In the prelude of music, improvisation is performed when a musician tests out the instrument or overcomes technical difficulty; Eliot succeeds in playing poetic improvisation in “Preludes.” The essay explains how masquerades of time produce the impersonalized prelude of poetry.

A Dynamic of Lacanian Pedagogy: Listening to the Poetic Unconscious of Dickinson and Stevens

장철우 한국현대영미시학회 2019 현대영미시연구 Vol.25 No.1

This essay explores how Lacanian pedagogical dynamics is beneficial to read modern poetry in the classroom. One of the key concepts in psychoanalysis is the unconscious, which makes Jacques Lacan distinct from Freudian scholars. Shoshana Felman employs the psychoanalytic concept, the unconscious, in showing the radical shift of position between teachers and students. The essay attempts to evince the poets’ concerns over the unconscious in their poems; Wallace Stevens juxtaposes imagination and the real in his verbal painting of mind-scape and Emily Dickinson shifts the position between master and slave or host and visitor. In their works, the replacement or displacement of the relationship between authors and readers is inevitable because the unconscious is not object, but speaking subject next to the conscious. For both poets, readers and authors are mutual cooperative listeners to the voice of the poetic unconscious.

Newborn/Posthumous-Immortality in Wordsworth’s and Eliot’s Poetics

장철우 한국T.S.엘리엇학회 2018 T.S. 엘리엇 연구 Vol.28 No.3

One of T. S. Eliot’s early poems, “Whispers of Immortality,” reminds us of the meaning of “Immortality,” echoing William Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” By praising the bony remains, the former hungers for metaphysical poets as poetic “tradition,” while by stirring childhood’s memory, the latter recollects human beings’ pure trace of the glorious realm of Heaven. The essay attempts to scrutinize the distinction between newborn-immortality of Romantic era and posthumous-immortality of modern era. By trying to overcome their contemporary mortality, two great poets pursue the path up to immortality in their works. Eliot profits metaphysical poets’ ruins in speaking of tradition which gets readjusted while Wordsworth insinuates that immortality appears near us in our childhood; for Wordsworth the immortality of infancy is mingled with a trace of having been in Heaven. In “Whispers of Immortality,” Eliot ironically experience the whispers of immortality in ruins of mortal human being: Webster and Donne’s metaphysics. The essays also highlights how the dead ruins become immortal and why the immortality can be replaced with his poetic key term “tradition.”

Re-shaking Time and Reshuffling Memory in “Rhapsody on a Windy Night”

장철우 한국T.S.엘리엇학회 2016 T.S. 엘리엇 연구 Vol.26 No.3

One of T. S. Eliot’s difficult early poems, “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” is famous for its enigmatic obscurity. The main images of the poem are associated with the past experience by employing such words as “twisted,” “smell,” and “memory.” The poem represents how a solitary walker wanders through urban streets in a windy midnight. From twelve o’clock to four o’clock, the walker experiences memories reshuffled by street lamps and moonlight. By scrutinizing a complex relationship between the street lamps and moonlight, this essay explores how the street lamps can affect the memory and why the poet seeks the mnemonic reconciliation of the moonlight with the street lamp. In terms of memory, the poet is highly indebted to Henri Bergson since the past seems to be twisted in the present. By re-shaking and reshuffling the twisted past, the poet directs the present to be redeemed out of a windy night’s capacity. Several hours after the midnight, from twelve o’clock to four o’clock, are not just actual time, but the virtual time which is relevant to duration because the virtual hour is not a separable span but a separable cluster of memories. In this sense, the rhapsody takes place not “in a windy night,” but “on a windy night.” This essay also highlights why the midnight can be the appropriate spot of spatio-temporal reconciliation between time and memory.

Ash3D 모델을 이용한 아소 칼데라 화산에서의 화산재 확산 수치모의 연구

장철우,윤성효 한국지구과학회 2017 한국지구과학회지 Vol.38 No.2

Aso caldera volcano is located in central Kyushu, Japan which is one of the largest caldera volcanoes in the world. Nakadake crater is the only active central cone in Aso caldera. There was an explosive eruption on October 8, 2016, the eruption column height was 11 km, and fallout ash was found 300 km away from the volcano. In this study, we performed a numerical simulation to analyze the ash dispersion and the fallout tephra deposits during this eruption using Ash3D that was developed by the United States Geological Survey. The result showed that the ash would spread to the east and northeast, that could not affect the Korean peninsula, and the volcanic ash was deposited at a place from a distance of 400 km or more in the direction of east and northeast. The result was in close agreement with the identified ashfall deposits. Ash3D can be useful for quick forecast for the effects of hazards caused by volcanic ash. 아소 화산은 일본 규슈 중앙부에 위치하며, 세계에서 가장 큰 칼데라 화산중의 하나이다. 나카다케 분화구는 아소 칼데라의 중앙 화구군에서 유일한 활동적인 화산체이다. 2016년 10월 8일 아소 산에서 36년 만에 폭발적인 분화가발생하였으며, 분연주가 11 km 상공까지 상승하였고 화산재는 최대 300 km 떨어진 지역에서도 확인되었다. 본 연구에서는 미국 USGS에서 개발한 Ash3D모델을 이용하여 2016년 10월 8일의 분화에서 발생한 화산재의 확산과 침적에 대한 수치모의를 실시하였다. 수치모의 결과 분화에 의해 발생한 화산재는 아소 칼데라 화산의 동쪽과 북동쪽으로 확산되어 우리나라에는 피해를 주지 않는 것으로 나타났으며, 동북동 방향으로 최대 400 km 이상 먼 곳까지 침적되는 것으로나타났다. 본 연구의 수치모의 결과는 관측 확인된 화산재 침적 결과와 대체로 일치하였다. 빠른 화산재 재해 예보를위하여 Ash3D를 이용한 수치모의가 유용하게 쓰일 수 있을 것이다.