무덤의 낙원과 죽음의 유충: 쿳시의 고딕적 세계

최지원 ( Jiwon Choi ) 영미문학연구회 2023 영미문학연구 Vol.45 No.-

This study examines J. M. Coetzee’s Karoo novel, In the Heart of the Country (1977), through the lens of postcolonial Gothic. The story has raised many conflicted critiques regarding the reliability of its narrator, Magda, which often poses questions about the meaning of the failed narrative. I argue that Coetzee’s Gothicism foregrounds the narrator’s Gothic subjectivity that seeks to defy the law of patriarchy under the colonial condition. Associated in some way with the Western Gothic tradition, In the Heart of the Country grapples with unpalatable socio-political issues by challenging the realist mode of representation that fails to capture the excesses of South African history. Hence, this paper traces the Gothic features in the novel with an emphasis on character representation and narrative structure. As a ghostly figure who raises the undead father by reiterating and rewriting her life story, Magda parodies and complicates the sequential narrative which, in Coetzee’s view, unpleasantly soothes the shattered colonial history. Coetzee’s fragmented story portrays a Gothic subject living in the garden of death, suggesting an alternative yet speculative imagination to the history of a colonial world.

Holmes Vs. Sherlock: Overcoming or Reclaiming Humanity?

한경민 영미문학연구회 2020 영미문학연구 Vol.38 No.-

This essay compares and contrasts Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes (hereafter Holmes) and the BBC’s Sherlock Holmes (hereafter Sherlock) in terms of the degree to which they respectively bear (or do not bear) a resemblance to Yuval Harari’s Homo deus, the new kind of humanity with superb data-processing capacity. Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles and the BBC’s “The Hounds of Baskerville” are given particular attention because of their focus on the conflict between science and superstition. Despite the modernized setting of the BBC’s Sherlock, Doyle’s Holmes rather than the BBC’s Sherlock shows more affinities to Harari’s Homo deus, and this essay argues that this ironical fact can be understood within the context of historical, social, and cultural changes. Whereas Dolye’s The Hound written at a time humanity was threatened by political upheavals and economic problems presents Holmes as a human god with the power to bring back light and order to the world of dark crimes, the BBC’s “The Hounds” carefully follows Sherlock’s gradual change from a computer-like person into a fallible human with potential to feel and respond to emotions. While the Victorian Holmes’s popularity as a hero of the new era arises from his ability to overcome human constraints, the modern Sherlock’s attraction resides in his potential for transformation into a human being with emotional capacity, which reflects the audience’s need to reclaim and cling on to humanity in the digital age.

Reading Keats’s “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles”: The Materiality and Mortality of the Fragmented Marbles

장성현 영미문학연구회 2020 영미문학연구 Vol.38 No.-

Keats’s sonnet “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” (1817) records the poet’s aesthetic reaction to Greek marble statues installed in the British Museum, which were originally part of the Parthenon in Athens and transported to Britain by Lord Elgin. The marbles’s aesthetic effect on Keats, I would argue, is inextricably bound up with his instant recognition of their materiality, which becomes plainly evident to him in their fragmentary state. The syntactic fragmentation of Keats’s sonnet (especially its sestet) appears to imitate, ekphrastically, the fragmented forms of the sculptures. The aesthetic experience related in the sonnet arises from Keats’s intense awareness of the decay of the marbles: they have eroded away over time and were cut into pieces by man’s activity. In Keats’s view, the aesthetic power of ancient artifacts has a basis in their material limits. While most of the enthusiastic reviews of Elgin’s collection at the time disregarded its fragmented condition, Keats is made painfully aware of that condition—perhaps thanks to his lack of in-depth knowledge of classical Greek art—and thereby of his own mortality. In his sonnet on the Parthenon marbles, thoughts of materiality and mortality are closely interwoven. The state of physical deterioration to which even the great art of the past succumbs—that is to say, the obvious fact that even the marbles do not outlast time—forces him to contemplate his own death, and further, the fragility of poetic fame. The broken nature of the marbles held in the museum leads Keats to appreciate their aesthetic beauty in relation to the history in which they are steeped. The material decay that temporality has caused to the Elgin Marbles overwhelms the poet with a sense of mortality, fate that he himself and all artistic achievements, perhaps his own poetry, cannot be spared.

Creaturely Right in Mary Shelley’s _Frankenstein_

한서린 영미문학연구회 2020 영미문학연구 Vol.38 No.-

This essay raises the question of creaturely right and its cosmopolitan possibilities in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein by arguing that the novel’s awareness toward the creaturely condition of earthly life allows us to imagine universal hospitality in the most radical sense. Exploring how the novel identifies the creature as the bearer of life and the creator as the sovereign, this essay’s reading opens another way to discuss the question of power and life beyond Foucauldian and Agambenian perspectives on biopolitics. Noting that the Judeo-Christian strain of imagining life given to creatures by the sovereign creator of life has been strangely neglected in current biopolitical discourse, the purpose of this essay is to demonstrate that the notion of creaturely life still persists in Western epistemology at the center of Enlightenment’s secularizing efforts. More importantly, the question of creaturely life and the creator’s sovereign power complicates modern biopolitics, opening another way to locate the epistemological grounds for violence toward life. This essay’s exploration of the creature’s right of life in Frankenstein will hopefully contribute to expanding our dialogue on power and life.

맬서스의 『인구론』에 나타난 결핍과 과잉의 정치학

박혜영 영미문학연구회 2020 영미문학연구 Vol.38 No.-

Population has been a highly controversial topic since the age of political economy until today as the number of world population is reaching 10 billion by the year 2050. The growth of population is accounted as a dismal symptom of the apocalypse of humanities because it requires more natural resources that are fundamentally finite. Malthus was a progenitor of casting this kind of pessimistic view on the population by demonstrating how deeply the question of increasing population was connected to the predicaments of the poor in the Romantic Britain. In his Essay on the Principle of Population, which was anonymously published in 1798 and immediately attracted a lot of public contention, Malthus, as a leading political economist then, introduced a fundamental fear of boundless increasing rate of population and its apocalyptic results in the future of the state, saying in his famous population theorem that “population increased in a geometrical ratio, and subsistence for man in an arithmetical ratio.” In this context, this paper examines Malthus’s view on the deficiency of nature, which brings scarcity in economy and the excess of sexual desire, which breeds surplus of manpower in demography. This paper examines Population as reflections of his ideas of political economy on the matter of mathematical imbalance between the power of productions(nature) and the power of reproductions(population). He argued that the later so greatly exceeds the power of food production that population should always be held within the resource limits through two types of checks; positive checks that raise the death rate and preventive checks that lower the birth rate. This article traces Malthus’s fearsome anxiety on the advance of over-population state by studying his two checks through which he dismisses the idea of the Gordwinian utopianism as unrealistic and undesirable for the poor. It was rather fear itself that led those uncivilized savage of the rural England out of their state of nature and to the better living condition in future.

19세기 미국의 문학지식인과 대중문화: 휘트먼의 민주주의의 전망 과 연관하여

유희석 ( Hui Sok Yoo ) 영미문학연구회 2007 영미문학연구 Vol.13 No.-

With the advent of globalization it is commonplace to hear that a geoculture that everyone shares finally comes to be realized. But it is equally easily argued that the geoculture itself is contaminated by the gobbling capital; homogenizing commercial culture symbolized by the Macdonald erodes the very foundation of Rabelaisean culture. These contradictory voices compel us to think over the role of literary intellectuals in shaping the common culture as a genuine public sphere which is neither of the two mentioned above, geoculture and Rabelaisean culture; the one is too vulnerable to the onset of commercialization leading to the mass culture while the other is no less inclined to the pitfalls of the vicious circle of binary opposites, the highbrow vs. the lowbrow. This paper purports to read W. Whitman`s post-bellum essay "Democratic Vistas" keeping in mind the dialectical tension of the literary intellectuals in 19th century America and its reading culture. Whitman`s argument against the general deterioration of spiritual conditions in America signally termed as ``the Gilded Age`` offers us opportunities to muse on the possibility of the common culture as a desirable public sphere. His total vindication for the vocation of (national) literature as well as the positive role of literary intellectuals in engaging with consuming culture is one of the guideposts to the horizon of ensemble-Individuality.

『황금색 공책』과 공감의 문학성

권영희 ( Younghee Kwon ) 영미문학연구회 2017 영미문학연구 Vol.33 No.-

Drawing on recent empathy studies, this essay aims to rethink the vexed relation between empathy and literature, so as to find a more solid basis of ethical potential for literature than the humanist defence of literary imagination as a key enhancer of empathy. Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie’s stricter definition of empathy is noteworthy in this regard, as they distinguish a set of similar emotional states such as emotional contagion, identification, perspective-taking, and sympathy from empathy proper. Referencing their view, I examine Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook and highlight the double workings of empathic connection and dissociation. The novel explores negative effects of feminine hyper-empathy along with ideological implications of narrative empathy. Further, its meta-fictional aspects demonstrate the literariness of empathy; as an emotive-cognitive process, it takes place when the subject aptly characterizes the object and takes his or her perspective, while keeping intact the self-other boundary, thereby performing an act of genuine understanding. I relate this dimension to Judith Jordan’s notion of retrospective self-empathy. Anna’s fictional doubles function as the experiencing self, the authorial Anna playing the role of the observing self. This leads to a higher plane of self-empathy and empathic understanding of the other.

구빈법 개정에 담긴 공리주의적 도덕원리와 후기 워즈워스의 경제사상: 벤담과의 비교를 중심으로

박혜영 ( Hye Young Park ) 영미문학연구회 2014 영미문학연구 Vol.27 No.-

It is said that the radical Young Wordsworth has abandoned his desire for social changes in England as his disillusionment on the course of the French Revolution got deeper. However, his act of apostasy, that is, discarding his political creed of early years and going to become a Tory conservative, should be reviewed within the social context of a new advent of economic theories and their utilitarian reformations on the rural England such as the Reform Bill and the Poor Law Amendment Act. Wordsworth, a poet of the poor and the humble rustic community as well asserted in his Preface of Lyrical Ballads, shows strong oppositions on those major reformative legislations mostly proposed by a group of Whig reformers, the so called ‘Whig-Benthamites’, for the purpose of improving the virtue of industry and eradicating the vice of laziness of the poor through the utilitarian punitive system of rewards and punishment. In this way, their antipathy on the Poor Law and its outdoor relief has brought the most hot contentions among the English intellectuals for more than 30 years. The purpose of this paper is to examine the idea of the moral economy of Wordsworth in his late years by reading his Postscript of the Yarrow Revisited and Other Poems published in 1835 in comparison with a Bentham’s propose in his famous Outline of a Work Entitled Pauper Management Improved. In his Postscript, Wordsworth asserts that the high rates of poverty and unemployment of the rural England are mainly caused by the rapid structural transformations due to “the new discoveries in arts and manufactures” and “reckless laws in conformity with theories of political economy” during the Industrial Revolution. As an opponent of utilitarian political economy, he upholds legal rights of the laborers for their full subsistence and relief from the government as it is the duty of a government standing “loco parentis to the poor”. Finally, he insists that the moderate possessions in the lower class should be a more practical method to revive their domestic affections and communal attachments to their neighboring people and place than the Bentham’s institutionalized confinement to the workhouse under the heartless and punitive principles sanctioned by the Poor Law Amendment Act.

근대적 인간의 변용 -월트 휘트먼에 대한 하나의 시론

강필중 ( Pil Joong Kang ) 영미문학연구회 2002 영미문학연구 Vol.2 No.-

This essay on Walt Whitman establishes the Whitmanian self as the ``modern man transfigured,`` as the ``personal I,`` open to the other individual beings, human or inhuman, distinguished from the ``universal I`` that appropriates all the other beings to itself, taking them for its representations. The modern idea of the mind of man as the universal I, combined with the American idea of equality, constantly begets the idea of each individual human being as an abstract representation of the mind of man in general. This idea reaches a culmination in Ralph Waldo Emerson`s idea of the Soul, or the Over-soul, for the Emersonian soul allegedly liberates every petty man locked in the body, while it turns any man into a representation of the Soul, consequently removing the radical personality (bodiliness) of a human being. Once liberated from the presumed limitation of the body, the Emersonian soul as the universal I takes all the bodily forms in the universe for its manifestations or representations. The Emersonian soul is extensively engaging itself in the physical universe and extensively disengaging itself from the bodies of man and nature at the same time. The very reality of real beings ceases to matter, ceding itself to the representative images or mental pictures in the long run. The Whitmanian soul is also extensively engaging itself in the physical universe, in every corner of the physical universe itself from the bodies of man and nature. It is itself a bodily being. In the Whitmanian sense of himself (``myself``), the being of one`s self is based on the verb ``be`` in the essential statement, "the body is the soul." The apparent valuation of the body in the equality of body and soul implies in no way a relative devaluation of the soul. Rather, it opens a new (``modern`` in the Whitmanian sense of the word) horizon in the understanding of being. Whitman has a strong sense that he is a person with a live body, that is, his soul, and that his ``personal I`` is open to the vast universe. Compared with Whitman, Emerson is not truly liberating because his expansion of man up to the Over-soul starts from his reduction of a human being to a half without body. The strong, fixed idea that the bodies of man and nature are restrictive works at the core of the Emersonian thought. Whitman reminds us of the necessity of the liberation from the very fixed idea, simultaneously bringing about the transfiguration of the modern man, and the imagination of the new modern man advances from the world of endless representations to that of real beings.

외상의 기억과 증언의 과제: 프리모 레비의 증언집이 던지는 질문들

이명호 ( Myung Ho Lee ) 영미문학연구회 2007 영미문학연구 Vol.13 No.-

This paper aims to explore the possibility and impossibility of witnessing the Auschwitz through the testimonies of Primo Levi, a Jewish Italian who survived the ordeals of the Auschwitz. I employ the psychoanalytic concept of trauma in order to understand survivors` experiences of the Auschwitz as an extreme ``limit`` event. Survivors repeatedly return to the past trauma, though returning itself is never a pleasant experience. Repetitive returns are retroactive attempts to "master" the past unpleasant stimulus, left unmastered in the protective shield of psyche. Through their traumatic return to the memories of Auschwitz, survivors confront an aporia between understanding and the impossibility of understanding, between witnessing and the impossibility of witnessing, and between language and silence. It is this aporia that lies at the heart of the Auschwitz testimonies, especially in the case of Levi. Levi thinks that only the ``Muselmann``, a borderline figure between the human and the non-human, but ``drowned`` and perished, can be a true witness. Thus testimonies by any survivors are an impossible attempt to witness by proxy. Adopting Giorgio Agamben`s argument on the Auschwitz, I interpret the position of witness as "remnants" of the catastrophe, and emphasize the role of listening.