포우 문학의 탈근대성과 대중문화

한기욱 ( Ki Wook Han ) 영미문학연구회 2006 영미문학연구 Vol.11 No.-

In our time, Poe`s stories of detective, horror, SF, and fantasy enjoy such a wide popularity throughout the world that they are often perceived as part of the postmodern mass culture. Accordingly recent studies and criticisms on Poe, which tend to dismantle the difference between high and popular art, reevaluate his works, focusing on postmodern features of his popular stories. We need to discriminate, however, two different kinds of postmodernity in Poe`s works: one as his strong impulse to break out of the modern system itself, and the other as his indulgence in the sensation of destruction when he destroys and violates everything modern, especially his own consciousness. This paper attempts to clarify how and why Poe`s works are significant in our time, paying attention to his ambivalent postmodernity. Reviewing remarkable critical judgements of T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Stanley Cavell, and Jacques Lacan, we come to find many faces of Poe such as artist, entertainer, scientist, philosopher, and psychologist. Especially illuminating to the nature of Poe`s postmodernity is ``the impulse of perverseness`` suggested in The Imp of the Perverse, The Black Cat, and other works. It is also noticeable that the impulse of perverseness in particular, and Poe`s narratives of delusion and destruction in general, correspond to Freud`s concept of the death drive. Poe`s love stories are not exempt from the death process either. Ligeia is the best story showing why the exalted relationship between man and woman of profound learning has to end up as a bitter battle of wills. In the latter part of the story, we come to witness the modern will-to-know transforming into a kind of vampirism to suck the life out of other living beings. Poe`s stories consist of two kinds of postmodern narratives complementing and conflicting each other; he observes consciously such hideous change of modern beings on the existential level, indulges in, and often tells us exaggeratedly ``delightful`` sensation of horror. The artistic achievement and significance of Poe`s works depend upon which narrative ultimately prevails.

미국 민주주의와제국: 멜빌 문학의 현재성

한기욱 ( Ki Wook Han ) 영미문학연구회 2003 안과 밖 Vol.14 No.-

근대세계의 폭력성에 대하여: 멜빌의 『모비 딕』과 매카시의 『피의 자오선』

한기욱 ( Ki Wook Han ) 영미문학연구회 2011 안과 밖 Vol.0 No.30

This study examines the problems of violence underlying the American modernity, comparing Cormac McCarthy`s Blood Meridian with Herman Melville`s Moby-Dick. Violence deriving from racism, inscribed at the beginning of America, seems to have decreased gradually as democracy has advanced. It should be noticed, however, how the visible violence involving killing native Americans and making slaves of the black people has been transformed through modernization into the invisible violence embedded in the modern capitalist system. Moby-Dick and Blood Meridian explore double-faced violence in America and the structural forces behind it by selecting such historical facts as whale-hunting or scalp-hunting as their main subjects. Both of the novels focus on the dark side of violence through drawing the theme of madness into the center of their narratives as well as using complex narrative modes. Though sharing much in common, these novels have their own distinctive ways of approaching violence. Moby-Dick reveals, through the curious madness of Ahab, subtle but iron-willed impulses of violence inherent in the modern system to destroy the vital mysterious forces of life, whereas Blood Meridian presents scenes of American nightmares where white people get obsessed with killing others, violating the ideal of democracy and civilization, thereby debunking the myth of the West and the ideology of imperial expansionism. In relation with the problems of violence, both the concepts and descriptions of nature (seascapes or landscapes) also play major role in these two novels since a whole consciousness of Ishmael or a new perception called optical democracy to appreciate nature is seen to operate here as the only possible capacity of resisting the mad violence of Ahab or Holden.

근대체제와 애매성 -「필경사 바틀비」재론

한기욱 ( Ki Wook Han ) 영미문학연구회 2013 안과 밖 Vol.0 No.34

This paper proposes to examine what the inscrutable and ambiguous elements in “Bartleby, the Scrivener” might convey us in relation with the modern world s a ``system``, by taking issues with the recent arguments presented by several prominent political and philosophical thinkers. Their fervent responses have been triggered off from Bartleby``s unforgettable ``formula``, “I would prefer not to”, which respectively indicates “the beginning of liberatory politics” to Hardt and Negri, an arche enabling the departure from the anti-systemic power(politics of ``protest``)as well as from the main stream to Zizek, the embodiment of the pure, absolute potentiality to Agamben, and “the brother-community” freed from the paternal function to Deleuze. Among others, Agamben casts Bartleby as a white sheet at the abyss of potentiality, and puts him on the pedestal of the Messiah. One the other hand, for Deleuze Bartleby``s singular response, which is neither refusal nor acceptance, is nothing more than the resistance to the pervasive paternalism. In this sense, the attempt of the lawyer-narrator to make a true relationship with Bartleby beyond the contract of employment can be viewed as an exploration of “the possibility of a becoming, of a new man.” Admitting those approaches on Bartleby have shed intriguing lights on Melville``s story itself, this paper argues that they can be refracted by rather reductive ways of reading the literary work. The ambiguous elements surrounding Bartleby, for one thing, help to question the validity of the symptomatic interpretations, thereby having us focused on the meaning of his inscrutability per se. He is inscrutable like Moby-Dick, the eternal Other, but the scrivener lost lots of vitality of the creature; he can also be called the exhausted Ahab when his willful, though mild, repetitive refusal to conform comes to such an extent of dying an inscrutable death on the Tomb. More importantly, grappling with the ambiguities deriving from uncanny actions of Bartleby, we unwittingly get to sense that the modern world, though it looks completely rational, might be mad as a system.

포우와 로렌스의 남녀관계 비교: 의지의 투쟁 개념을 중심으로

한기욱 ( Ki Wook Han ) 한국로렌스학회 2008 D.H. 로렌스 연구 Vol.16 No.2

This paper purports to compare the man-woman relationship manifested in Edgar Allan Poe`s grotesque love stories such as Ligeia and The Fall of the House of Usher with that of D. H. Lawrence`s later works, focusing on the concept of `the battle of wills.` The concept is presented most clearly in the Poe chapter of Studies in Classic American Literature, but it can also be applied significantly in Lawrence`s own works. Specifically, St. Mawr, Princess, and The Woman Who Rode Away can be argued to explore new ways of life possible on the American continent through the prism of the battle of wills. And in this sense, Lawrence can be called as an American novelist. It should be noted that in St. Mawr only after Lou decided to walk away from the liberal circle of Rico`s world, and from the battle of wills with him, can she start a journey towards a new way of life in America. Even in America, she needs to refuse to be involved in a battle of wills with Phoenix, whose presumptious advance she successfully defeats. In Princess, the battle of wills between Dollie and Romero is dynamically presented against the vividly represented landscape of Rocky mountains. Their negative and fateful relationship, which has remarkable similarities to that of Ligeia and her husband, shows that Lawrence recognizes and dramatizes the difficulty of overcoming the battle of wills between different races in America. In The Woman Who Rode Away Lawrence makes another such attempt by presenting a white woman`s journey towards the Chilchuis Indians after her conscious self`s death, which seems to have occurred in the battle of wills with her husband. Lawrence`s attitude towards both the woman and the Indians is remarkable in the sense that he responds sensitively to racial otherness while dismantling any racist prejudices.

멜빌의 남태평양 소설들과 근대성 문제: 로렌스의 멜빌론 고찰

한기욱 ( Ki Wook Han ) 한국로렌스학회 2014 D.H. 로렌스 연구 Vol.22 No.1

This paper purports to reconsider Lawrence’s critical position on Typee and Omoo, Melville’ early travelogue-styled novels of the South Pacific, comparing it with those of a few representative Melville scholars and critics. In his critical essay on the two works, which ended up to be the chapter 10 of Studies in Classic American Literature, Lawrence made it clear that in Typee Melville escaped two times, at fist from our modern world of humanity, and later from the savages of the South Sea Islands he happened to live with. Since the spread of postmodernity and postcolonial studies many scholars and critics including Gilles Deleuze noticed in those works the narrator’s white civilized self to be ‘dismantled’ and emphasized the importance of Melville’s separation or flight from the mainland stream of modern civilization. They seemed to pay, however, no attention to the second escape, which is presented almost as desperate as the first one in the narrative itself. Another significant point of Lawrence’s essay lies in his argument that Melville insists there should be a paradise somewhere, and the South Sea Island he lived with savages for a time, should be one, while through the narrative he tells a totally different story in secret. It should be attributed to Lawrence’s sharp critical insight when he points out that the queer symptom of Tommo’s unhealing leg reveals the island is actually a kind of ‘soft hell’, even worse than the ‘purgatory of Home and Mother’ from which he escaped. Making such keen critical comments in a passionate manner, Lawrence reveals an outline of the peculiar course of history he thinks we should pursue, that is we should make a great swerve from the straight forward progress of the white modern civilization though we cannot go back to the premodern life.

Melville의 "Benito Cereno" 연구

한기욱 인제대학교 1992 仁濟論叢 Vol.8 No.2

This thesis contends that Herman Melville is deeply concerned about social dimensions of American life, and that his method of integrating such dimensions in his works is truly original. "Bonito Cereno", a masterpiece of 19th century American literature, shows well how deeply and persistently Melville explores his contemporary social problems such as slavery and expansionism. In "Bonito Cereno", however, Melville brings into focus not so much the problem of slavery per se as his Yankee protagonist(captain Delano)'s inability to perceive the mutiny of Black slaves. As the main action, the bulk of which is narrated from captain Delano's point of view, unfurls itself, the reader is increasingly involved in what is wrong with captain Delano's mind. That is to say, an overriding emphasis is structurally put on the particular nature of Delano that makes him immune to obvious symptoms of Black revolt. In fact, the underlying problem in "Bonito Cereno" is why captain Delano cannot recognize the revolt of slaves with all the evidences of insurrection on San Dominick, the Spanish slaveship. The answer of the text to that question seems to lie in his "singularly undistrustful good nature". But captain Delano's narrative itself males it clear that such a simple and innate good nature is not incompatible with the most outrageous proslavery ideology. Actually both his misgiving toward Spanish captain Bonito Cereno and his indulgent "genial" attachment to Babo the black rebel reveal that Delano's innocence and benevolence cannot be separated from his racist preconceptions with which the entire narrative of Delano is imbued. Delano's practical mind and attitude is another important factor to obstruct his recognition. Delano's way of dealing with what he observes and feels is typical of a pragmatic thinker such as Benjamin Franklin. Delano does observe and feel a lot of things but proceed instantly t? classify what he senses, cutting out what he instinctly feels irrelevent to his practical usage. After the task of classification has been done, the process of reasoning out as if to solve a mathematical problem is taken up. Melville shows subtlely that such a pragmatic way as Delano's of dealing with the outside world, when combined congenially with his "singularly undistrustful good nature", is the principal cause of the failure of recognizing the revolt and, at the same time, functions in itself as a real power to subdue it. Indeed, it is in the characterization of Delano as a typical Yankee spirit with an American innocene' which contains mental qualities capable of dominating other peoples with an 'undistrustful good nature', that Melville reveals himself a rigorous realist.