사무엘 존슨과 18세기 계몽주의 공적 지식인의 초상: 21세기 융복합 시대의 새로운 통섭적 지식인을 향하여

정정호 ( Chung Ho Chung ) 한국18세기영문학회 2009 18세기영문학 Vol.6 No.2

The aim of this paper is to discuss Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) as a most representative public intellectual in the 18th-century England. It seems to me that we need badly a public intellectual like Johnson in this age of functional specialization. Many literary scholars and humanities intellectuals now stick to their ivory tower separated from the secular realities of the world. They tend to be secluded technical producer of academic papers for the very small number of professionals. They cannot reach the society and history to which they belong. This is the very beginning of the so-called "Crisis of the Humanities." We can discuss Dr. Johnson as public intellectual in three aspects. First of all, Johnson was a great scholar critic. As T. S. Eliot pointed out, Johnson was "one of the three greatest critics of poetry in English literature" (162) including John Dryden and S. T. Coleridge. The very essences of his criticism come from wide knowledge and acute understanding of language, close reading strategy, historical imagination and deep understanding of the humanities. Secondly, Johnson was a great prolific writer called "Great Cham of Literature" by Tobias Smollett. He read a wide range of books with various topics. Thirdly, Johnson was not a narrow specialist but an open-minded generalist who had a wide variety of intellectual curiosities and convergent or consilient methods. In other words, Johnson was really a public intellectual in the civil society of the 18th-century England with a vision of common reader, common culture and common humanities. How can we thresh Dr. Johnson as a critical intellectual for the 21st century? We can propose nine tentative memos as follows: (1) understanding importance of language in the humanities, and integration and interpenetration of language and literature; (2) the restoration of power of literature for the concrete life and society; (3) expanding the frontier of literary genres for the establishing the wisdom literature; (4) the return of dialogical imagination for the effective communication and comparison; (5) reestablishment of British literary tradition with balance, toleration and golden mean; (6) development of the convergent or consilient humanities; (7) reinvention of public intellectual with wise reading and critical consciousness; (8) avoidance of the philistinism and specialized professionalism; and (9) the pursuit of the whole man including spiritual problem in this age of rationalistic instrumentalism. In order to build a new convergent or consilient humanities in the public sphere for the 21st century we have to redraw and reproduce the portrait of Dr. Samuel Johnson as public intellectual in the year of tricentenary anniversary of his birth.

셸리의 「줄리안과 마달로」: 감성과 이성의 정치학을 넘어서

유선무 ( Son Moo Ryu ) 한국18세기영문학회 2009 18세기영문학 Vol.6 No.1

This paper claims that Shelley`s "Julian and Maddalo" intervenes a moment of political crisis in the early 19th-century Britain, when the public sphere, essential to the democratic society, started to be disintegrated. According to Habermas, the normative ideal of the public sphere in the 17th and 18th century was the space where a large number of peers came together to engage in reasoned arguments over the key issues of mutual interest and concerns. After the Revolutionary debate in the late 18th century, the foundation of the public sphere was severely undermined mostly because the rise of unpropertied mass public brought the degeneration in the quality of discourse and also because the rise of radical groups made it impossible to escape addressing the class divisions of civil society. Instead of searching for the common good or general interest, the public sphere had changed into a springboard for the diverse interest groups to demand social rights-the services or protections of the state. "Julian and Maddalo" is an attempt to install a new ethical basis for the degenerated public sphere, reflecting the increasing diversity in ethos of the period. In "Julian and Maddalo", the conversation between the two friends over the possibility of social reform breaks down twice because they are incapable of looking at the world from the counterpart`s perspective. In short, their communicative reason is predicated on the exclusion of alterity. However, the Maniac guides the friends to a moment of sympathetic reconciliation by providing a new language which acknowledges the authenticity of otherness and embraces the sincerity of the feelings. Nevertheless, Shelley carefully excavates the oppressive and conforming impulse in the principle of feelings by bringing into focus the social constructiveness of emotions and the disciplinary force of the society which makes the emotions. Accordingly, the diffuse sympathy of Julian does not have the social force to change the system, while rendering the existent factional and exclusive ties and emotions stronger. Just like the way that the disciplinary society incarcerates the Maniac inside the wall of the mental institution, the rational minds of the two friends keeps the feelings that the Maniac evokes within the private sphere. Only after the return of Julian to the Venice, Maddalo`s daughter`s refusal to reveal what has happened to the Maniac gestures towards a new subjectivity which resists both the egoistical desire of the rational subject and the futile sympathy of the emotional subject.

Reimagining the Order of the Giants on Stage: Seongbukdong Beedoolkee Theatre’s Gulliverse 2

신도현 한국18세기영문학회 2025 18세기영문학 Vol.22 No.1

In Seongbukdong Beedoolkee Theatre’s Gulliverse 2, Kim Hyuntak reinterprets Part 2 of Gulliver’s Travels, connecting the incomprehensible size of the Brobdingnagians to the gigantic conglomerates. Just as 18th-century English readers of Swift’s prose observed Gulliver’s desperate attempts to survive in the land of the giants, the audiences of Gulliverse 2 are invited to reflect on how Gulliver internalizes what I call “the order of the giants”—a metaphor for the system of neoliberalism in twenty-first-century Korean society built upon corporate power. In this context, this article focuses on Gulliverse 2 to explore how both works—Swift’s prose and Kim’s play—portray Gulliver’s internalization of “the order of the giants” within their respective cultural contexts. I argue that, while Part 2 of Gulliver’s Travels reveals how Gulliver, from the giants’ perspective, ultimately diminishes his self-image, which he once envisioned as a gigantic English imperial subject, Gulliverse 2 poignantly depicts how a group of Gulliver(s) face their own death by internalizing the neoliberal order of Korean society—which can be understood through Lauren Berlant’s concept of “cruel optimism.” Then, I shift my focus to Kim’s dramaturgy in Gulliverse 2 that theatrically adapts Swift’s strategy of satire. I argue that, just as Swift intentionally parodies travel narrative to prompt his readers to critically examine 18th-century English society, Kim similarly returns to the style of his work—in this case, experimental theatre—by foregrounding the very theatricality of Gulliverse 2. This metatheatrical approach invites the audiences to engage with its modality critically and, in doing so, reflect on twenty-first-century Korean society mirrored on stage. As a framework, I draw on Michael J. Conlon’s reading of the performativity in Gulliver’s Travels—“a performance of understanding”—to analyze how Swift and Kim engage with the modes of their respective works—a parody of travel narrative and a metatheatrical work experimenting with its theatricality—for their audiences to experience Gulliver’s shifting self-awareness through his internalization of the order of the giants.

호모 컨슈메리쿠스: 18세기 소비혁명과 제인 오스틴의 『노생거 애비』

김진아 ( Jina Kim ) 한국18세기영문학회 2018 18세기영문학 Vol.15 No.2

This essay aims to analyze the characteristics of consumers in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey in conjunction with the Consumer Revolution during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The major consumers in this novel such as General Tilney and Mrs. Allen define their identity mainly in terms of their possessions. The things Genral Tilney is attached to are positional goods whose values lie not in their use value but in their semiotic value that imparts the owner’s social status to the viewer. Mrs. Allen’s passion is only for dress through the medium of which she judges herself and other people around her. Austen depicts the characters who are defined as consumers in a very negative light. They are vain, self-centered, and morally deficient. They relate with other people as though they were things, not human beings. This causes them to fail in communicating properly with Catherine Moreland, who does not share their value of the things they are obsessed with. This essay also explores how Jane Austen delineates certain aspects of consumer society of this historical period such as the compulsive power of fashion and the nature of positional goods through her portrayal of these consumers.

(Un)dreaming the Celestial New World in The Blazing World and Gulliver’s Travels

( Siyeon Lee ) 한국18세기영문학회 2017 18세기영문학 Vol.14 No.2

This study investigates how the lunar/celestial new world was dreamed and undreamed (via radical mechanization) respectively in Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World (1666) and the Voyage to Laputa in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), the two major English successors to Francis Godwin’s The Man in the Moone (1638). The Man in the Moone popularized the post-Galileian lunar fiction across much of Europe, which indeed began as a dream with Johannes Kepler’s Somnium (Dream, 1634), but Cyrano de Bergerac’s L’Autre monde (1657), written under Godwin’s direct influence, transformed the genre by foregrounding the core issues of seventeenth-century natural philosophy―matter and motion. In condemning Rene Descartes’ incorporeal substance, Cyrano dislodged fascination with the lunar new world from the earlier fictions. The Blazing World is a conscious response to Cyrano’s libertine fiction, in which Cavendish rejects not only Descartes but also mechanist materialists including Cyrano, Thomas Hobbes, and Robert Hooke, instead asserting “self-moving Matter.” While defining motion as intrinsic to matter (body), Cavendish renews and rewrites the cosmic fantasy by restoring “Immaterial Spirits” and “rational Souls” wherewith to create many a “World of Nothing, but pure wit.” On the other hand, Swift’s Voyage to Laputa, also influenced by Cyrano, registers (by satirizing) the triumph of Isaac Newton’s mechanistic views on matter and motion. The Voyage to Laputa, a post-Newtonian variation upon the seventeenth-century lunar fiction, completes undreaming that genre by literally changing into an automaton not just the flying vehicle to the moon but the heavenly body itself.

The Rise and Fall of Chinese Empires on the English Stage, 1660-1760

민은경 ( Eun Kyung Min ) 한국18세기영문학회 2006 18세기영문학 Vol.3 No.1

Widowhood, Coquetry, and Desire in Jane Austen’s Lady Susan

조선정 한국18세기영문학회 2015 18세기영문학 Vol.12 No.2

This paper presents a reading of Jane Austen’s lesser-known early novella Lady Susan, examining the representation of widowhood as a critical foray into the modern discourse of female desire. Challenging the mainstream scholarship which emphasizes the authorial verdict on the amorous escapade of the eponymous heroine in one way or another, I demonstrate that the novel creates a less judgmental, less moralizing and more tolerant, more exploratory space for signifying capacious female desire. My first argument is that Austen, by taking a defamilarizing look at the discourses of motherhood and sensibility, the two powerful cultural scripts for constructing the ideal of domestic femininity, illuminates the performative nature of both and the possibility of critique as well. Next, I interpret coquetry as a transgressive strategy of deferral of marriage, whereby the patriarchal gender relation in the regime of heteronormativity is called into question. The heroine’s conclusive marriage, I contend, is not a submissive sign but another performativity that enacts the potential female agency. Lastly, I revisit the implications of the narrative shift in the conclusion chapter of the novel. I argue that the appearance of omniscient narration does not intend to nullify the heroine’s struggle but rather clarifies the conditions, meanings, and limitations of her desire. Elaborating these three related arguments, this paper aims at placing Lady Susan in a continuum of widow-coquette, the complex figure who interrogates the parameters of domestic femininity, and thereby placing Lady Susan as worthy of a significant precursor to Austen’s canon in its insight into the dynamic link between shaping of modern female sexuality and the narrative of marriage plot.

Occupational Cross-Dressing in the Autobiographies of Hannah Snell and Charlotte Charke

류혜원 한국18세기영문학회 2020 18세기영문학 Vol.17 No.2

This paper addresses the craft of disguise and spatial mobility through the reading of two eighteenth-century autobiographies. The Life and Adventures of Hannah Snell (1750) deals with the life story of a woman who dons male garb and joins the Royal Marine. A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Charlotte Charke (1755) features an actress and author notorious for cross-dressing both on and off the stage. Broadside ballads that deal with narratives of cross-dressing began to be printed at the end of the sixteenth and became greatly popular in the next century. While the autobiographies of Charlotte Charke and Hannah Snell partly follow the customary patterns of printed ballads, their narratives diverge from them in that Charke and Snell’s clear self-identification as laboring woman allows their crossover into economic agents. The ruses they employ to traverse out of traditional boundaries and to participate in exclusively male domains are examined in this paper with respect to the transforming definition of industriousness and women’s labor at the mid-century. While the second half of the eighteenth century witnessed the rise of domestic subjectivity based on the secluded private space, the two autobiographies signal that an antithetical type of identity also arose by using spatial mobility to breach the rigid division. The tradition of broadside ballads and popular literature must be investigated alongside the domestic novel in order to fully envisage the contemporary bounds of women’s work.

사무엘 존슨과 비평적 다원주의 -대화적 사유와 통섭적 상상력을 위한 하나의 시론(試論)

정정호 ( Chung Ho Chung ) 한국18세기영문학회 2010 18세기영문학 Vol.7 No.2

Unfortunately enough, the haunting image of old conservative Dr. Johnson is still tenaciously with us. Johnson is still a prisoner in the remote area colonized by the continued tradition of Romanticism and Modernism. The dusty mirror of Samuel Johnson should be polished or shattered. We need to be able to demystify and problematize the conventional Dr. Johnson in order to discover the real Samuel Johnson in a wider literary and critical context. Since Johnson`s lifetime, attention has not infrequently been called to the inconsistency and contradiction in his criticism. Even Johnsonians who value his works highly often enough find themselves embarrassed by apparent inconsistencies in his critical practice. But Johnson is not guilty of an outright self-contradiction. Elements in his criticism seem contradictory to those who ignore Johnson`s intrinsic resistance to the imposition of a single perspective. We could understand Johnson`s inconsistency and contradiction which positively permit multiple perspective in his critical performance. The aim of this paper is to discuss the multiplication of critical perspectives in Johnson`s practical criticism with a working hypothesis and tentative methodological scheme for the multiple perspective`s in Johnson`s literary criticism. I deal with 8 critical perspectives: (1) mimetic-realist perspective, (2) affective-pragmatic perspective, (3) expressive-psychological perspective, (4)combinatory -hermeneutic perspective, (5) rhetorical-communicative perspective, (6) historical-biographical perspective, (7) sociological-political perspective and (8) moralist-religious perspective. The eight critical perspectives discussed do not exist in absolute isolation from each other. Each of these perspectives not only possesses isolated value: it is also modified, complicated, and enriched by its association with each of the others. This paper also explains the historical significance of Johnson the critic and argue that Johnson was both a traditionalist in the eighteenth-century neo-classicism and an innovator for the nineteenth romanticism and twentieth-century modernism. To conclude, Johnson`s literary authority and critical modernity are very much alive and relevant to all of us in the 21st century with critical pluralism and convergent imagination.

Werewolves, Giants, and Gulliver: Marvelous Bodies in the Posthuman Predicament

( Siyeon Lee ) 한국18세기영문학회 2021 18세기영문학 Vol.18 No.2

This essay proposes to reappraise the monstrous creatures at the liminality of humanity in Gerald of Wales’s Topography of Ireland and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels as marvelous bodies in the posthuman predicament, particularly at the intersection of the posthuman and the colonial. Apart from its latest theoretical sophistication and primary associations with the cyborgic human, posthuman thinking is not confined to the present century but stimulates new readings of older texts, committed to reconsidering the human itself and the human-nonhuman boundaries, challenging the unitary, normative subject of the Enlightenment, and understanding bodies of difference from non-normative perspective. This essay focuses on the different ways Gerald’s and Swift’s monstrous creatures appear to viewers, for the monstrous is associated both etymologically and cognitively with morphological transgression and constructed as such in certain frames of view. Despite the manifestly colonial agenda of the Topography as a whole, the story of the werewolves of Ossory grants them potent subjectivity in both text and illustration, and Gerald’s own intervention in the story suggests ambiguity, thus partially conceding to the ailing she-wolf demanding to die a human. In contrast, Gulliver is the first giant in the Travels whose voracious body and behavior, threatening carnage and cannibalism, embodies the very monstrous, and he further suffers a series of dysmorphic transformation. Oblivious to his own posthuman shapeshifting, Gulliver turns to all other bodies than his own the dehumanizing view of a micrographer like Robert Hook, denying their wholeness in difference. It is this Gulliverian eye that reduces Irish bodies to mere edibles, wearables, and biodegradables in A Modest Proposal. Gulliver is subjected to that very microscopic inspection by Brobdingnaggian philosophers and labelled Lusus Naturæ. It turns out that monstrosity is in the enhanced and Enlightened eye of the beholder, like the deformed eyes of the Laputans.