윌리엄 블레이크와 몸-구속과 일탈의 변증법

유선무 19세기영어권문학회 2007 19세기 영어권 문학 Vol.11 No.1

The human body is William Blake's main preoccupation essential to the understanding of his work. His interest in the human body stems from the dual social functions that the body serves, the body as a passive and reproductive yet largely unproductive object requiring careful discipline and training and the body as the source of anarchical impulses challenging the very hegemonic paradigm and knowledge that has constructed the body. Even though Blake distinguishes these two types of body by calling them "vegetative body" and "Eternal body" respectively, he makes it clear that the former is a corrupted form of the latter caused by the specific cultural and social condition. He attributes a part of this corruption to the mind/body dualism informing both Lockean empricism and Cartesian idealism, which renders the body passive and impotent against the system of knowledge and power. Eventually Blake's emphasis on the body challenges the Enlightenment ideal of the subject of consciousness and presents a unique model of an embodied subject whose body mediates its inside and outside and offers a model for the socio-political principle. This subject is characterized by its flexibility and malleability, contrasted with the solidity and unity of the Urizenic body. Against the Urizenic body which mobilizes all the organic parts in the service of the will of the subject, the Eternal body of the embodied subject exists as a will to move out from its unity and homogeneity into relationship. In other words, the body is not a tool of separation and division but the condition and context through which the self is able to have a relation with others. The transformation of the Urizenic body to the Eternal body, however, requires more than our changed attitudes towards the body. The body is the very focus of ideological production and reproduction so that it requires the transformation of the whole social system that has organized and given meaning to biology. Blake imagines that the puncturing of the seemingly impervious social system comes from the very body that it has constructed, largely because of the body's inherent transgressive characteristics. Blake draws attention to the ability of visual perception, which guides human beings towards an alternative history and reality.

윌리엄 블레이크의 『델서』: 낭만주의적 생태학을 넘어서

유선무 19세기영어권문학회 2017 19세기 영어권 문학 Vol.21 No.3

This essay is an attempt to read William Blake's The Book of Thel as an ecocritical text that challenges two major ecological thoughts that emerged in the eighteenth century, an “arcardian” stance of British nature poetry and the idea of “economy of nature” that emphasizes wise human stewardship. Blake's greatest contribution to the ecological thought is his continual sensitivity to the life of the body, which resists both the subjectless immersion into nature and imperial imposition of human values onto nature. The Poetic Genius is central to this essay's understanding of Blake's proto-ecological thought. Even though it differentiates the human from the non-human, its seemimg anthropocentrism is curbed by its promotion of malleability and fluidity, pushing the human subject to move outside the cave of the self and to help encounter other human and non-human life forms. Thel in The Book of Thel is seduced by nature to give up her human identity, including not only her anthropocentric idea of utility but also her life of the body as an embodied form of the Poetic Genius. Thel gives up the former willingly embracing experiential possibilities that her selfhood does not already know. However, she decide not to let the latter go, realizing it reduces her to a vegetable body with its five vitiated senses. Thel's rejection of the vegetable body is directly related to Blake's notion of the “spiritual body,” which benefits contemporary environmental thinking. The notion of the “spiritual body” limits the exercise of the human destructive will on nature, while promoting the emergence of new energy and possibilities in nature.

Trauma and the Crisis of Poetic Representation in Wordsworth’s “The Thorn”

유선무 한국18세기영문학회 2018 18세기영문학 Vol.15 No.1

As a poet of trauma, William Wordsworth is faced with the dilemma of having to find a way to voice traumatic muteness without disrupting silence. “The Thorn” exemplifies the difficulty of acquiring such a poetic voice by portraying a narrator who fails to read, let alone transmit, Martha’s traumatic suffering. The narrator’s failure is bound both to his sense of self that privileges emotional autonomy and transparent knowledge and to the arbitrariness of language itself. Against the backdrop of the failed narrator of “The Thorn,” emerges nature as a force that tempers the very desire of making alterity transparently known and available to the subject’s meaning-making process. Instead of transforming traumatic experience into a communicable form of knowledge, nature lets the noncommunicable aspects of human experience be, momentarily liberating the human mind from the burden of signification. Ultimately, nature in “The Thorn” disciplines the human mind so that it can turn back on habits of thought and easy categorization to discover the unassimilable otherness and inscrutability inherent in both human and non-human worlds. “The Thorn” seeks to show that the successful transmission of trauma is possible only through cutting the experience free from the subject of experience or at least from the familiar forms of subjectivity that require individuation as the condition for their existence. In other words, the grief and loss of Martha must not be experienced as merely subjective, consciously owned and recognized. Instead, the poem seeks to foster affective discomfort and cognitive unease to disturb the very notion of subjectivity itself. The affective interruption of the subject moves readers out of familiar forms of personhood so that the prohibition of mourning imposed on Martha can be ultimately lifted.

데리다와 함께 블레이크의 우정 읽기

유선무 한국영미문학교육학회 2013 영미문학교육 Vol.17 No.1

This paper aims to read William Blake’s notion of friendship with Jacques Derrida’s re-politicization of Friendship in Politics of Friendship, in order to express Blake’s powerful presence within a field of political philosophy. While friendship in neo-liberal world order is marginalized as private, impotent, and sentimental feeling, it was originally a strong political concept working as a condition for genuine justice. Derrida is trying to revive friendship as a political concept supplementing justice, which will illuminate Blake’s similar efforts to redefine friendship in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. For Blake, friendship is the very power that imbalances the “antagonistic” relationship between a friend and an enemy resulting in the de-stabilization of the subject herself. The marriage in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is not between the Angel and the Devil but within the Angel (or Angel turned into Devil), which points out the incessant indeterminacy within each friend. Without friendship, human beings are completely isolated, left only with a violent way of interaction, if such thing is possible. Derrida’s disruption of the friend-enemy antinomy similarly suggests the subject’s fluidity or her openness to the absolute heterogeneity of the other. This opennenss and indeterminacy are presented as a baseless base of community without home or hearth, a kind of community completely breaking itself from a faction or a clique. Blake’s last work, Jerusalem, tests the theory of friendship he explored in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell as a public and political principle of community-building. Some might be skeptical about the political efficacy of this loose community without strong solidarity. However, the revolution of “the political” that both Derrida and Blake pursue is something waiting to be actualized since, as Blake succinctly put, “what is now proved was once, only imagin’d” (E 619).

숭고의 역사에서 트라우마의 역사로: 워즈워스의 『서곡』읽기

유선무 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 영미문학연구회 2012 안과 밖 Vol.0 No.32

도시ㆍ농산촌의 관광농업 도입과 지역경영전략

유선무 한국농어촌관광학회 2000 농어촌관광연구 Vol.7 No.1

셸리의 "몽블랑"-공백의 정치학

유선무 19세기영어권문학회 2007 19세기 영어권 문학 Vol.11 No.2

Shelley's “Mont Blanc” describes a moment in which the sheer materiality of nature exceeds the cognitive and linguistic power of its perceiver. This moment is traditionally identified as the sublime moment and usually followed by the exaltation of the subject's mind and imagination over nature. The subject, only temporarily humbled before nature, eventually transcends anything it encounters in the material world. However, in this poem, the speaker's desire to unify mind and nature under the sign of a subject is frustrated mainly due to the nature's resistance to finite reduction to the subjective meaning process systems. Shelley calls this semantic indeterminacy in nature “vacancy” and celebrates vacancy as a sign of the proliferation of signification. The vacancy of “Mont Blanc” not only attests to the fullness of the world and but also inscribes anti-foundational epistemology and ontology of the subject as a foundation of political reform. We need to pay a close attention to the subtle way in which Shelley relates the “vacancy” of the mountain to the “vacancy” that the ethical and political reformers leave. Shelley was enthusiastic about the possibilities opened up by the anti-foundational epistemology and ontology, especially its potential contribution to the progressive renovation of democratic values and multiplication of democratic practices. In this way, Shelley's notion of vacancy anticipates the poststructuralists' notion of vacancy, which they locate at the center of democracy. Poststructuralists reveal a certain symbiosis between post-structuralist ideas of representation and democratic culture by transforming the crisis of representation into the tool of deepening the radical potential of democracy. Especially Marxists influenced by poststructuralism try to politicize the semantic indeterminacy, by elevating the perpetual subversion in the space of language into the practical political struggles for the exercise of power. Similarly, Shelley saw in “Mont Blanc” the possibility of “articulation,” a term postMarxist invented to describe a practice establishing a relation among elements in a way to modify individual identity as a result of such a relation. The articulation makes the structure never entirely secure, which, in case of civil society, allows the space for the articulation of new hegemonic projects, which would disturb and even (eventually) displace the hegemony of those who are currently dominant. This potentiality of perpetual change is what Shelley believes to be literature's utility, which will substitute the utilitarian political reformers' economic “utility”. The proliferation of struggles between power and counter-power is only possible when one is constantly reminded of the existence of “constitutive outside.” Literature is the silenced voice, “vacancy” of those constitutive outsides, which challenges the condition and limit of both individual and collective identity.

코울리지의 대화시: 공론장의 대화의 윤리

유선무 영미문학연구회 2008 안과 밖 Vol.0 No.24

The Art of Dwelling in the “Peculiar Nook of the Earth”: Revisiting The Ruined Cottage

유선무 한국비평이론학회 2018 비평과이론 Vol.23 No.1

This essay is an attempt to read The Ruined Cottage as a sustained reflection on the ethos of “ecstatic dwelling,” a rethinking of oikos in the face of “the elemental, the uninhabitable, and the incomprehensible.” While critics view the so-called “reconciling addendum” in The Ruined Cottage as the facile idealization of unity between nature and human imagination, this essay claims that it is the very idealization that the “addendum” criticizes. Instead of translating nature’s response to human suffering into human terms, the Pedlar presents the spear-grass, a weed, as a model for “ecstatic dwelling,” which can be learned only when one radically transforms traditional discourses of humanism, personhood, and community. Margaret’s failure to dwell and the subsequent destruction and ruination of the dwelling are intermeshed with her melancholic commitment to the notion of oikos as an original, stable site of unity and identity. In contrast, the spear-grass in the “addendum” practices the art of dwelling that makes a home in exile. The survival of the spear-grass in the ruined cottage correlates with a particular sense of belonging, which does not have an antithetical relationship to non-belonging. Unloved and unwanted in the world and never given a proper place, as in the case of Margaret, the spear-grass experiences a foreign place as a home, one that is redefined as a place of difference, where one can enjoy tranquility, however, precarious and temporary.