Monstrous Allegory: From Frankenstein to Dracula

Hisup Shin 19세기영어권문학회 2020 19세기 영어권 문학 Vol.24 No.1

What is striking about Bram Stoker’s Dracula is that it is an expanding body of allegories and symbols, which continues to feed on different contexts and discourses. Almost all major readings of the text in recent decades are defined by an effort to find various meanings and concepts behind major characters or events for their allegorical consideration. The purpose of this essay is to examine how these symbolic transpositions can be viewed as part of a historical path of stylistic shifts in 19th-century Gothic fiction. By the historical path, I am referring to the way in which the allegorical process of figural conceptualization in Gothic fiction is informed by the scientific pursuit of physiological realism and negotiations expanding across the broad spectrum of knowledge and representations. The point of particular attention is an increasing sense of asymmetry in Gothic fiction reflecting the way the allegorical convention of figural simplification and symbolic condensation is counterpoised by the questions of what it means to create fictional personage cast in physiological functions and imperatives. I want to argue that Gothic fiction responds to this textual tension by giving birth to monsters, a site of anomalous bodily figurations in which issues of bodily peculiarities and urges can be addressed beneath the allegorical act of moral or cultural condemnation levelled at the gross flesh of inhumanity. The essay, first of all, gives a theoretical account of allegorical formulations revolving around Gothic monsters, which reflects the shifting knowledge of the human body and its social or technological implications. With this theoretical account, the essay will embark on the reading of the two most famous Gothic novels in the 19<SUP>th</SUP> century, Frankenstein and Dracula. In doing so, the essay argues that the making of monsters at the heart of allegorical formulations reflects significant stylistic changes in relating human physiology in Gothic novels.

여성/남성문학의 경계 허물기 혹은 여성문학이라는 ‘괴물’ 장정희 외 지음 -『19세기 영어권 여성문학론』, L.I.E. 영문학총서 제 11권, 2008

박령(서평자) 19세기영어권문학회 2008 19세기 영어권 문학 Vol.12 No.2

「바라죠프 백작부인」 속 올컷이 재건한 미국 재건시대

장기윤(Ki Yoon Jang) 19세기영어권문학회 2021 19세기 영어권 문학 Vol.25 No.1

Louisa May Alcott’s literary life is one very exciting and thrilling suspense of its own. Her initial reputation as ‘the children’s friend’ came from one of the all-time favorites in English literature, Little Women. That reputation underwent a surprisingly shocking turn when her anonymous and pseudonymous publication of blood-and-thunder stories were discovered by Leona Rostenberg. The discovery soon paved the ground for rediscovering Alcott as one of the leading feminist writers of 19th-century America. Though a huge contribution to enriching Alcott studies as well as women’s studies, her rediscovery as such has seriously thwarted many other non-feminist approaches to her stories. This essay intends to widen the ground in Alcott scholarship by proposing to read her stories in a historicized way and tracing her unconventional view of the most influential event that happened in her life and career: the Civil War followed by Reconstruction. As much as critical were gender issues at the time, mid- and late-19th-century America was literally and figuratively overwhelmed by the conflict and reunion of the North and the South over slavery. So far, the history of the war and reconciliation has been recorded in favor of the North, who were to abolish racial discrimination in opposition of anachronistic Southern planters. Yet a recent generation of historians launched on rewriting it with equal consideration of the Southern causes while decentralizing racial issues from the position of the primary reason of the war as the North used to insist. This essay places Alcott’s much-overlooked story, “Countess Varazoff,” in relation with that rewriting and shows how Alcott the Northerner tries to look at the American policies of Reconstruction as a set of the North-directing imperialist projects of colonizing the South in that story. Alcott’s representation of the Polish countess’s persisting resistance to the despotic possessiveness of the Russian prince in “Countess Varazoff” turns out to be a call for unbiased and objective acceptance of differences within one nation of ‘democratic’ America.

19세기 후반 영국의 맥락에서 본 콘라드의 인종인식

전수용 19세기영어권문학회 1999 19세기 영어권 문학 Vol.- No.2

휘트먼과 디킨슨 시에 나타난 “길들여진 죽음”

정연재 19세기영어권문학회 2002 19세기 영어권 문학 Vol.6 No.1

정연재월트 휘트먼과 에밀리 디킨슨은 동시대 작가이며 두 작가 모두 미국 근대시를 대표하는 정전화된 시인들이다. 또한 두 시인 모두 그들의 시작 전체를 통해 죽음이라는 추상적인 주제를 깊이 있게 탐구하였다. 이 논문의 첫 번째 부분에서 저자는 휘트먼과 디킨슨이 각자의 시에서 어떻게 죽음의 문제를 다루었는지를 두 시인의 몇몇 대표적인 작품들을 중심으로 살펴 보고자한다. 이 논문의 두 번째 부분에서는 죽음에 대한 휘트먼과 디킨슨의 태도를 19세기 미국의 대중문화라는 보다 큰 구조 안에서 재조명해 보고자한다. 각기 다른 시대는 죽음에 대한 저마다의 독특한 문화적 이미지와 태도를 가지고 있다. 19세기 미국인들의 죽음에 대한 인식과 자세는 죽음이라는 엄연한 현실을 부인하는 20세기 현대인들의 부정적인 인식경향과는 매우 다름을 우리는 반드시 고려해야할 것이다. 마치 빅토리아 시대 사람들이 성(性)에 대한 언급을 혐오하며 억압했던 것처럼 현대인들도 죽음이라는 냉엄한 현실을 왜곡하고 회피하려 하는 경향이 있는 것이다. 20세기의 이러한 비관적 경향과는 달리, 휘트먼과 디킨슨의 시들은 죽음을 극도의 두려움과 불안을 일으키는 공포의 대상으로 묘사하고 있지 않다. 휘트먼과 디킨슨 두 시인 모두 죽음에 대한 각자의 고유한 견해와 태도를 다양한 시어로 표현하였지만 그럼에도 불구하고 그들의 시는 “죽음 미화하기”(“the beautification of death”) 또는 “죽음 길들이기”(“the domestication of death”)라고 정의될 수 있는 19세기 미국 중류계층의 한 문화적 경향과 밀접한 관계를 가지고 있음을 밝혀보고자 한다.

19세기 영소설에 나타난 두 문화의 갈등과 통섭연구

추재욱(Jae-uk Choo) 19세기영어권문학회 2011 19세기 영어권 문학 Vol.15 No.2

This paper addresses Victorian people’s responses to the two cultures, science and culture. As writers liked to get intellectually engaged with scientific development and its influence on the society and the people, their views of the development in that period are also reflected well in the two Victorian novels, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet. For that purpose, key contents in the texts have been considered: the scientific attitudes of two doctors, Dr. Jekyll and Dr. Lanyon, Sherlock Holme’s scientific inclination, and the deductive methods in his detective achievement, and the influence of Darwin’s evolutionary theory on the writers and the characters. In the 19th century, the Darwin’s theory caused the intellectual conflicts between each camp of science and culture while it brought out the new epistemological and ontological awakening to the contemporary people. A change of the general view of ‘science’ and ‘culture’ over the late 19th and early 20th centuries has also been discussed along with theories of several critics, Matthew Arnold, T. H. Huxley, P. B. Snow, George Levine, and Edward Wilson. This study is sure to provide a valuable opportunity to rethink over the recent crisis of humanity studies, caused by the assumed superiority of science and technology. Of course, humanity studies and culture should not be trivialized, but, in order to achieve this, we need to gain the genuine capability of thinking of the two cultures in consilient terms because we have to end the ever-present conflict between the two cultures.

『일곱 박공의 집』

김이은(Lee Eun Kim) 19세기영어권문학회 2014 19세기 영어권 문학 Vol.18 No.1

This paper aims at tracing the inherited Puritan past casting a deep gloom over the House of the seven gables and its residents and examining Hawthome’s intention to demonstrate the community as what really is. In Puritan rhetoric, religious zeal and secular prosperity are closely interrelated because God’s blessing is embodied in earthly wealth. This unique rhetoric highlights Puritan hypocrisy when Puritans exclude, oppress and take advantage of the marginalized in the name of religion or God’s providence. In The House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne deals with a 150-year-long American history through the family feud of the Pyncheons and the Maules. Interestingly, Hawthorne puts an impoverished and isolated old spinster, Hepzibah Pyncheon in the center instead of Jaffrey Pyncheon, the legitimate Puritan descendant. As a protagonist, Hepzibah also stands for the majority struggling to live in this capitalistic society. Hawthorne portrays the pivotal values in this community through the malicious assumptions and intruding gossips about Hepzibah and Clifford. What is more, in exploring the history, the narrator depends on the gossips, legends, rumors and traditions as ‘contrary averments’ to the recorded documents. Through this process, Hawthorne reveals the multi-layered truth of the person or the events by criss-crossing both ways of transmitting the past. In spite of a happy ending, there still remains disharmony, indifference and diversity in Salem community with more meanings and significance in contrast to the so-called or assumed homogeneous America.

허먼 멜빌의 「베니토 세리노」의 유럽중심주의 담론과 서사적 해체

서주희(Joohee Seo) 19세기영어권문학회 2021 19세기 영어권 문학 Vol.25 No.1

This paper examines how Amasa Delano’s limited thought-process is represented in Herman Melville"s novella, “Benito Cereno,” and how the novella ultimately deconstructs Delano’s misleading insight on the San Dominick by focusing on the narrativity and textuality of the novel. In “Benito Cereno,” Delano’s process of unearthing the mysterious past of the San Dominick and its elusive captain, Benito Cereno, entails a constant reading of signs and stories. However, by the end of the first section, we as readers realize that Delano’s speculations and suspicions were miscalculated, if not entirely wrong. By representing Delano’s thought process and its limitations, I argue that the novella serves as Melville’s reflexive criticism on Eurocentric discourse and its racist implications. While the first half of the novel tracks Delano’s (mis)reading, informed by Eurocentric discourses of history and race, the second half of the novel subversively deconstructs the legitimization of Eurocentric power by inviting the reader to participate in refiguring the plot. Here, I take cue from Paul Ricoeur’s theory of narrativity that puts emphasis on the reader in relation to fictional narratives. As the plot departs from Delano’s point of view and ventures into the deposition of the mutiny trial, the reader can reread, undermine, and question Delano’s reading. This experience, in turn, subverts the progression of narrativity, and creates the possibility of a multilayered, non-linear temporality that can further question the progress of Eurocentric modernity.

“응급 원격수업”: 19세기 영문학 전공 교과목의 ‘온라인수업’ 변환 사례

원영선 19세기영어권문학회 2020 19세기 영어권 문학 Vol.24 No.2

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought about unprecedented changes in the landscape of education across the world. Following the first few-weeks’ mass closures of educational institutions in March 2020, all the universities and colleges in Korea began the spring semester online. Nationwide switching to online during such a short period of time may have proved both our strength of IT infrastructure and operational effectiveness of all those involved in educational system, but the salient features of this instant transition in all levels of educational practices ask for shared on-going discussions about ‘pandemic’ pedagogy, especially as the threat of COVID-19 is now being ever greater. This study thus aims to be a part of such discussions, first, briefly examining the notions and approaches that the current emergency education compels for a deliberation, and then sharing the experience of the shift-to-online teaching of the Nineteenth-century English literature course. With a critical caution against rushed ideas of post-corona education, and also to draw attention to contextual appreciation for pandemic education, the paper takes on “emergency remote teaching” suggested as an alternative term by online education scholars, and goes on to scrutinize the “Film Narrative and English Literature” course implemented as such. Its focus is more on the major aspects of the modification in instructional design, operational strategies, and student supporting required for an asynchronous model of “emergency remote teaching,” rather than the course content, so that its context and process elements can be underlined.

"It Does Not Touch Me": Emersonian Poetics of Mourning in "Experience"

Eun-Gwi Chung 19세기영어권문학회 2006 19세기 영어권 문학 Vol.10 No.1

Eun-GwiChung“It [the calamity] does not touch me,” Emerson's seemingly merciless response to the death of his son, Waldo, has attracted considerable, sometimes severely harsh, attention to Emersonian self. Revisiting the very passage in “Experience” which brought about numerous caustic responses, this essay explores the nature of Emersonian mourning in the philosophical terrain of the 19th century and reevaluates the nature of Emersonian skepticism concerning experience and representation. Rather than being an object of a mourning elegy, Waldo, in “Experience,” is re-figured as the power of skeptical passiveness in this world. Though so many readers complain of the callous ruthlessness of Emerson, I argue that Emerson's aversion, ie, the impossibility of experiencing the death of the other, begets questions to the condition of life, “Where do we find ourselves,” or “Why not realize your world.” For Emerson, in the 19th century America, the mission of “Experience” is to nurture the condition of life within a philosophical practice of skepticism and is to be fulfilled in his writing of the unapproachable reality. In this sense, Emersonian poetics of mourning is rather to awaken us in this world where words fail us and reinvites us to the very world there is nowhere else to go find it.