Marjorie Perloff

DOI:10.15794/jell.2015.61.4.001 Vol.61(No.4) 531-555, 2015

In Wittgenstein’s lexicon, the highest art is that which somehow presents us with life itself as it is actually lived, conveyed in the “language of information” but framed so as to render it other, unfamiliar, strange. Wittgenstein’s dictum in his Culture & Value #6 that “The work of art forces us to see it in the right perspective, but without art the object is only a part of nature like any other,” goes in tandem with the Conceptualist movement in art. Since the late 1960s, when artists declared that theirs was a conceptual art and invoked the example of Wittgenstein, the role of context, circumstance, and framing have become increasingly central. In the art world, the case for conceptualism was made decades ago, but in the poetry world, notions of “original” language, the authentic self, and unique personal emotion die hard. Wittgenstein and Duchamp can provide the context for the conceptual movement in art and poetry. In fact, conceptual writing, inimical by definition to the short, self-contained lyric poem and often dependent on book form, is especially difficult to anthologize. It is the leading French conceptualist Sophie Calle who provides the bridge to such current “conceptual” performance poets as Vanessa Place, Caroline Bergvall, and Kenneth Goldsmith. Her recent publication in English by Lisa Pearson’s Siglio Press, of both The Address Book and Suite Venetienne may be the moment to reconsider conceptualism in a fresh perspective.

Wittgenstein, Conceptual Art, Conceptual Poetry, Marcel Duchamp, Sophie Calle,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Robert T. Tally Jr.

DOI:10.15794/jell.2015.61.4.002 Vol.61(No.4) 557-576, 2015

The project of literary cartography is fraught with peril, as the urge to produce accurate maps confronts the specters of not only the impossible, but the undesirable. As with Borges’s fabulous geographers who developed a perfectly useless map coextensive with the territory it purported to depict, such mimetic scrupulosity thwarts the project of literary cartography as well. The hero’s itinerary is traced along the map that is formed, at least in part, by those itinerant tracings, while the epic narrative gives shape to the world’s spaces. Like Odysseus, the bard who would sing the world into being must connect the itinerary to the map, blending lived experience with that imaginary geography to form a rhapsodic totality. Or like Dante, who pauses to study geography in the midst of his own infernal trajectory, the literary cartographer must construct an architectonic by which the otherworldly system can make sense, such that the spaces revealed are also the spaces produced in the narrative. Or like Ahab, whose relentless pursuit of the “inscrutable thing” at the heart of the white whale inscribes his own mission with indelible markings, as his mapping project proves wholly reflexive. In all these ways, literary cartography represents and produces a world system for the reader to explore. Drawing upon key scenes from the Odyssey, the Inferno, and Moby-Dick for this essay, Tally reflects on literary cartography by examining the interrelations among the itinerary and the map, narrative and description, perception and abstraction, lived experience and the social totality.

Spatiality, literary cartography, narrative, literary theory, representation,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Youngmin Kim

DOI:10.15794/jell.2015.61.4.003 Vol.61(No.4) 577-593, 2015

There has been an extensive body of theoretical and literary analysis on the 9/11 catastrophe has marked an indelible trace of trauma on the threshold of 21st century in 2001.The critics after 9/11 produce a list of essays on 9/11 poetry, which deal with an orthopedic structure of the categories of memory, witness, and narrative to give us an anamorphic perspective for understanding the nature of the poems after 9/11. They demonstrate how the 9/11 event has become the driving force for the new understanding of poetry as an emerging popular genre in the American literature intergrated in our daily lives. It was not simply in poetry that we could find the new understanding of American values before and after 9/11. There has been an extensive body of theoretical analysis on 9/11 as well as immense interest in dealing with 9/11 both extensively/significantly and/or obliquely in the novels. In fact, post-9/11 American fiction has been reconfigured in terms of a post-9/11 ethics. The story world built up by novels in the 21st century is deeply embedded in the question of how to reconstruct the ethical principles, when the novelists encounter the ethical dilemma of representing the sublime events such as earthquakes, genocide or death, while recognizing the absence of the object in the feeling of the sublime image of the disaster. Appropriating Dominick LaCapra’s “acting-out” and “working-through” and W. J. T. Mitchell’s “ethical process” from “ekphrastic fear” to “ekphra- stic hope,” this article argues that post-9/11 fiction offers readers a way to begin thinking a new narrative ethics addressing how to respond internally and externally to tragics events like 9/11.

21st Century American fiction, ethics of the image, ekphrasis, trauma studies, acting out/working-through,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Mads Lee

DOI:10.15794/jell.2015.61.4.004 Vol.61(No.4) 596-611, 2015

The psychological dimension hidden underneath the surface of Richard Hugo’s poetry is a much neglected aspect that, in the light of Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytic hypotheses that explore the ‘mysterious’ mechanisms of the human psyche and their effect on language, begs for a discourse long overdue. Many of the subjects discussed by Kristeva in her essays Powers of Horror (1982), Black Sun (1987), Revolution in Poetic Language (1984) are pertinent and useful in broadening our understanding of Hugo’s poetry and add a utilitarian dimension to poetry in general as a therapeutic device or as a means to catharsis. This essay discusses the poem, “Museum of Cruel Days,” by the poet Richard Hugo through a psychoanalytic framework involving the underlying psychosomatic processes encompassed in the making of the language using being. It examines how the phenomenon of abjection and its abject permeate the poem and influence our reading as either appealing or revolting to our poetic sensibilities. Through Kristeva’s essay, Powers of Horror (1982), that serves as the theoretical framework, this paper engages with the poem’s abject imagery; its themes of violence and cruelty that speak of a poem whose emotional content is founded on fear and cries out for sympathy, for fellowship and understanding; the signs of narcissism and compulsive abjection embedded in the poem while also discussing the potential cathartic development that prevents the poem from becoming a poetic monstrosity and provides it with a utilitarian purpose.

The abject, abjection, Richard Hugo, catharsis, Julia Kristeva,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

Donguk Kim

DOI:10.15794/jell.2015.61.4.005 Vol.61(No.4) 611-627, 2015

The year 1881, ten years before Thomas Hardy’s masterpiece Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) was published, marked a centenary of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781) that was held in high esteem by Victorians. Despite the revival of Kant’s philosophy at that time, however, Victorians tended to present themselves as Kantians and anti-Kantians, especially as Kant’s concept of so-called transcendental idealism was put under philosophical scrutiny, and Hardy was one of those Victorians with reservations about this Kantian transcendental deduction. The aim of this paper is to briefly examine the ways that Hardy as an artist received Kant and then, to suggest that Hardy is an exponent of multivocality in literature. To do this, several scenes from Tess of the d’Urbervilles are analysed as a case study, in order to elucidate implications of which Hardy’s philosophical standpoints are presuppositions for the book. It is stressed that hybrid stylization charged with multivocality, which is bitingly effective in Hardy’s art, serves to undermine the alleged homogeneity of Kantian apodictic abstraction against which he guards. Hardy is highly averse to monothetic ideas, so much so that his book, with the hope of opening up a single authority and power to dialogic discussions, shows a marked concern with facilitating contact with what is belittled or suppressed by any dominant voice. So, in brief conclusion, it is underlined that by maximising this dialogic, democratic spirit, Hardy’s book manifests itself as one of the greatest works of art.

Hardy, Kant, transcendentalism, multivocality, hybrid stylization,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

손현 Hyun Sohn

DOI:10.15794/jell.2015.61.4.006 Vol.61(No.4) 629-650, 2015

Whereas Romanticism, particularly the British one because of its motherland’s leading role in the Industrial Revolution and mean urbanization, was a critical field that was traditionally dominated by the city/ country binarism, it is now surely accepted that Romantic attitudes toward the city were more nuanced and complicated than could have been understood in such a set pattern. This new wave, however, results in another bias by focusing on the repressed urbanity of Romantic poetry and so alienating the country now, not the city as of old, from its discursive angle. Hereupon, this essay aims not just to “reverse” but to “neutralize” the socio-spacial hierarchy of city and country in Romantic poetry in a full cycle of Derridean deconstruction. For the purpose, this essay takes William Blake and William Wordsworth as examples and reads their poetry in terms of masochism, in Leo Bersani’s definition, a psychic strategy of detouring the inherently destructive sexual energy through an aesthetic framing. It argues that Golgonooza, the ideal city of Blake in opposition to London, and Grasmere, the ideal country of Wordsworth in opposition to London again, are an object for each poet’s masochistic desire and as such ever in the process of self-shattering in a dialectic with the opposed object. Thus the conclusions drawn are that it is still valid to read Romantic poetry in terms of the difference of the city and the country and that the difference needs to be understood in the sense of differance, that is, the difference as it is produced and deferred simultaneously.

영국 낭만시, 도시, 시골, 차연, 피학성애, British Romanticism, the city, the country, differance, masochism,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

최석훈 Seokhun Choi

DOI:10.15794/jell.2015.61.4.007 Vol.61(No.4) 651-675, 2015

The essay examines the relationship between life and writing in Margulies`` 1997 Pulitzer finalist, Collected Stories, from a post-structuralist perspective. According to Derrida, meaning is possible only within the socially-constructed sign system he calls ``writing.`` This view implies that even a person``s life should be written and read as text to acquire meaning. In the play, writing does not only serve as the medium of the characters`` relationship but also represents their lives themselves. Ruth Steiner, a Jewish writer long past her heyday, and her protege Lisa Morrison begin to build an intimate relationship as Lisa visits Ruth``s apartment to have an individual conference on her writing assignment. Prior to the meeting, Lisa read all of Ruth``s works to become her big fan and Ruth also ``met`` Lisa through the latter``s short story based on her life; throughout the play, they read each other as text. Ruth hires Lisa as her secretary and guides her way into professional writing as her mentor for 6 years. However, conflict arises when Lisa writes and publishes a novel that seems to be based on Ruth``s most cherished secret without her permission. At the heart of the conflict is the textuality of human life and their rejection of each other``s reading. Unlike most performance reviews of the play which tend to reduce the play to the issues of law and ethics surrounding creative freedom, the paper argues that the play provides a profound philosophical insight about life as text that has an infinite possibility of meaning.

도날드 마귤리즈, 『이야기모음집』, 데리다, 탈구조주의, 글쓰기, Donald Margulies, Collected Stories, writing, Derrida, poststructuralism,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

황보경 Bo Kyeong Hwang

DOI:10.15794/jell.2015.61.4.008 Vol.61(No.4) 677-701, 2015

This paper examines Lois Lowry``s novel The Giver in relation to Jacques Ranciere``s political theory and philosophy, particularly in terms of his key concepts, such as "the partition of the sensible," "dissensus," and "subjectivation." This inquiry aims to foreground the important function of politics in revealing the arbitrariness of social distribution of power and bringing about reconfiguration of dominant ways of perceiving and dividing the world. Dissensual subjectivation, brought about by political "disidentification" with socially designated roles and expectations, enables a different partition of the sensible. Lowry``s The Giver delineates the process of dissensual subjectivation of its protagonist Jonas, the designated receiver of memory who learns about the ugly truth of his society behind its peaceful, egalitarian facade. Jonas``s society, a dystopian future community characterized by rigid rules and regulations with no room for any personal choice, abides by what Ranciere calls ``police`` logic. Memories transferred to Jonas introduce an element of heterogeneity and dissensus into his world of enforced sameness. In refusing his alloted role as receiver and embarking on an arduous journey to Elsewhere, Jonas not only impels his society to decompose and recompose its perceptible organization but also envisions an alternative, more egalitarian mode of existence that embraces the constitutive outside of its social regime.

랑시에르, 감각의 나눔, 로이스 로우리, 『기억전달자』, 디센서스, Ranciere, partition of the sensible, Lois Lowry, The Giver, dissensus,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory

한지희 Jihee Han

DOI:10.15794/jell.2015.61.4.009 Vol.61(No.4) 703-724, 2015

As one of the representative lesbian feminist critics, Adrienne Rich’s dream of a common language has often been examined as an innately woman-centered and separatist vision for a long-silenced mass of lesbian women. Nonetheless, she has continued to get out of both the posh privilege of Token Woman granted by the mainstream critical community and the specific and discriminating position of a lesbian poet-critic in the 1970s and 1980s. This paper, therefore, looks into Rich’s critical essay on Emily Dickinson and illuminates how she tried to save both Dickinson and herself from the privileged but confining myth of Token Woman and to connect her to the history of masses of common women who have dealt with the same problems of silence, self-abnegation, depression, and a death wish. In particular, it examines Rich’s critical notion of “lesbian feminism” and “lesbian continuum” and how Rich re-defined Dickinson’s silence and slanted language not as evidences of her insecurity and ‘little-ness’ as a woman poet but as proofs of her poetic confidence as an outsider poet. Ultimately, this paper aims to show how much Rich wanted to purge the negative connotation from the word “lesbian” and to underscore “the eye of the outsider,” persistent in the tradition of American woman poets.

특별한 여성, 보통 여성, 레즈비언 여성주의 비평, 레즈비언 연속체, 외부인의 시각, Token Woman, Common Woman, Lesbian Feminism, Lesbian Continuum, the Eye of the Outsider,영미문학, 문화연구, 비교문학, 비평이론, English and American Literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, critical theory