Alan Durant

DOI: Vol.63(No.4) 623-640, 2017

Humanities scholars have recently begun to use the phrase “narrating rights” as a way of describing an increasingly discussed area of intersection between legal, ethical, and literary topics. This article examines the conceptual basis and directions of that emergent area of work. It outlines features of “rights” as generally understood in law, along with relevant associated issues; it explains how, in the complex history of the English word rights, that word has conveyed different, often contested notions which persist into contemporary thinking; and it concludes with comments and queries regarding the challenges which face studies in humanities in using “narrative” as a way into understanding rights. In developing its arguments, the article highlights the interconnectedness of linguistic, literary and legal aspects of political and cultural topics, and encourages further interdisciplinary work.

rights, keywords, narrative, Raymond Williams, word meaning

Ruth Barton

DOI: Vol.63(No.4) 641-658, 2017

This paper discusses the narrativization of clerical sexual abuse in popular film and television, with specific reference to Irish fictions. I argue that a combination of circumstances that are both historical (derived from the Puritan and Romantic traditions) and contemporary (arising out of concerns around the sexualization of children for commercial purposes and internet pornography) have led to a new Puritanism that actively censors imagery that depicts the child as sexual being. While this is understandable, even desirable, it diminishes the potential for considering why men abuse children. In the place of understanding, then, we have the counter narratives of the demonic priest and, even more disturbingly, the abuse survivor as deranged psychopath. I further argue that the figure of the priest has become a way of questioning authority, especially in Ireland where Church control was an inextricable element of state control in the twentieth century. At the same time, the collapse of trust in authority that has been one consequence of the financial crisis has given rise to a new search for moral arbiters that, in turn, has occasioned the rise of a new fictional trope―the good priest. While an interesting development in terms of the national narrative, this elevation of the priest to symbolic figure has distanced the clerical abuse narrative from the real events that it originally confronted. In this way, the child has been doubly silenced, once by society and a second time by popular culture.

clerical sexual abuse, popular culture, new Puritanism, scandal, monstrosity

Brian Reed

DOI: Vol.63(No.4) 659-674, 2017

In response to current debates about making within the digital humanities, this article proposes an approach to data visualization that is grounded in poetics. After recounting Johanna Drucker’s arguments concerning a humanities-based approach to graphical display, it analyzes works by two contemporary Canadian poets―bpNichol’s “TTA 30: poem as a machine for generating line drawings” and Derek Beaulieu’s “Translating Translating Apollinaire (rasterbator)”―as a mean of illustrating what happens when graphing and other visualization techniques are deployed ludically, that is, for the sheer joy of discovering, and disporting in, their formal and expressive possibilities. Visual poems of this kind remind readers that graphs are artifacts produced through scribing and drawing. While they may function symbolically or referentially, one cannot forget that they also communicate gesturally, too. They convey tone, energy, and intensity through implied movement. Such writing arguably constitutes a form of practice-led research, a distinctly humanistic approach to knowledge creation. Poets have been paradigmatic makers in the West for millennia, and they may at times have more to teach us about a humanities-based approach to visualization than scholars who adhere to the rules and norms that govern conventional academic writing.

data visualization, visual poetry, digital humanities, contemporary poetry, Canadian literature

Svend Erik Larsen

DOI: Vol.63(No.4) 675-686, 2017

Literature consists of works of language, but it has never been able to function as literature without being part of an extended media landscape. From time immemorial, oratures require performances to work and thus cannot exist without use of bodily signs or use of various tools and instruments. Today, of course, this extended media landscape is vaster and more complex and distributed through more differentiated and numerous agencies than ever before, which also changes the mutual relation between the media involved in the production, dissemination and use of literature as well as the changing position of literature in the media land-scape. The aim of the paper is to contribute to an understanding of the dynamics of the media landscape with literature at its center, rather than making an account of the separate media involved. In contrast to the majority of discussions on literature and media, this paper focuses on material which is not contemporary. Centering on Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and “A Modest Proposal” (1729) in particular, the analysis of the role of a changing media landscape as a platform for articulation of memory from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to the present day offers a historical perspective, which adds new dimensions to the contemporary debate developed by considering the role of literary history, of transmission of tradition and of anonymous mediation.

history, memory, anonymous mediation, media landscape, Jonathan Swift

Youngmin Kim

DOI: Vol.63(No.4) 687-707, 2017

Yeats himself presents the details of the way to the Unity of Being in his critique of the Kantian transcendental subject in A Vision. The details were given by the “instructors” as the “metaphors for poetry” through the mediumship of Georgie Yeats. During the period of the automatic writing and speech with Georgie Hyde-Lees, his medium wife, Yeats was told by the Instructors “not to read philosophy until their exposition was complete” (A Vision 12), because they were worried he would lack “the patience and the curiosity to follow their application” of “their central idea,” and prefer a “hasty” one of his own (A Vision 11). The Instructors, nevertheless, encouraged Yeats “to read history in relation to their historical logic, and biography in relation to their twenty-eight typical incarnations, that he might give concrete expression to their abstract thought” (A Vision 12). After writing the first version of A Vision in 1925, Yeats made every effort to understand the enigmatic “abstract thought” of the spiritual Other and to give it “concrete expression,” as his letter to Olivia Shakespear reveals. However, philosophical knowledge dominates Yeats’s intellectual discipline until the rewriting the 1937 edition. The final analysis of the written product of A Vision demonstrates a poetics of writing which presents a verbal representation of the vision of the spiritual Other through narration and analysis so that the readers may further concretize it into perception and conception.

William Butler Yeats, poetics of writing, A Vision, deconstruction, Other

Son-moo Ryu

DOI: Vol.63(No.4) 709-727, 2017

The return of religion to the center of scholarly attention, also termed as the ‘religious turn’, helps us rethink the relationship between the divine and human in Blake in ways that transform how we view religion, human affect, and human agency. The seeming contradiction between Blake’s destruction of personal identity (self-annihilation) and his consistent critique of external authority prompts us to ask who or what enables the conditions for a genuine historical change that this critical activity inevitably provokes. This essay argues that Blake quarried the conceptual resources of Christianity for a viable solution to the ethical and political predicament of his times. For Blake, God, with his overflowing generosity, saturates and exceeds the present horizon of possibility, including the very identity of the subject. In other words, God’s appearance as a phenomenal event, His excessive givenness, locates fulfillment not only in the development and achievement of the willful subject but also in the graceful acceptance of the free gift of God’s love. In Blake, the call from the Christian God is the paradigmatic example of a call that precedes the subject as a kind of a claim on the subject that he or she cannot anticipate or comprehend. The heteronomous determination of the subject, however, leaves room for human action and produces new, unexpected forms of agency. The affective interruption that occurs when God appears as excessive givenness mobilizes the capacity to give and act. God’s supernatural self-gift suggests the self-denying gift character of being itself, binding God more intimately to our horizontal love in time and space than we might have dared to suppose from a more vertically oriented and traditionally ontotheological perspective.

Religious Turn, God as Gift, Givenness, William Blake, Jerusalem

Jihee Han

DOI: Vol.63(No.4) 729-749, 2017

In examining the validity of the claim that Yone Noguchi made a critical influence on Ezra Pound’s Imagism, this paper describes a brief history of the ‘Hokku’ in East Asia and traces how the classical Chinese poetic component, ‘Faju,’ is changed into the Japanese vernacular ‘Hokku’ and ‘Haikai’ and then naturalized into a modern Western style ‘Haiku’ poem. Then, it examines Noguchi’s interpretations of the Japanese Hokku spirit in the context of the invented traditions of modern Japan, orchestrated by Okakura Kakuzo with the help of Ernest Fenollosa. Finally, it sheds light on Pound’s comparative approach to world literatures around the early 1910s and argues that his poetic theory of vorticism germinated from his cosmopolitan spirit to preserve the links with other nations, literatures, and cultures.

Pound, Noguchi, Haiku, Imagism, Vorticism

Jung Pil Park

DOI: Vol.63(No.4) 751-773, 2017

While rarely escaping realistic or modernist visual conceptions, many studies of Philip Larkin’s poetry have failed to uncover the sometimes sly cue that his visuality is a pseudo-presentation of realism. I elucidate these postmodern peculiarities of Larkin’s images, sometimes with the aid of the theories of poststructuralists like Derrida and Lacan. Larkin’s images occupy an entirely different topology reflecting the post-war apocalyptic mood and postmodernism. While adopting the logic of revolutionarily reshuffled realism, they become the reformed products of vacuity or difference and register deterioration, inflammability, and uncanniness unlike the solid images of modernism. Larkin’s images are both more and less imagistic than those of Imagism.

Postmodern visuality, inertia, negative images, transgression, obscurity

양균원 Kyoonwon Yang

DOI: Vol.63(No.4) 775-797, 2017

This paper is an effort to elucidate some characteristics of American language poetry. It will first examine how language poets write difficult poems for political purposes differently from modernist poets. Secondly, it will look into some causes for which they deliberately ignore traditional genres to compose a hybrid of poetry and prose. And thirdly, it will clarify that their poetry pursues singularities rather than a structural core, realizing their anti-reductionist impulse. The strategy of referential opaqueness, on which language poets heavily rely, will be considered as effective in breaking the capitalistic logic of mainstream culture and extending the openness of life. Language poets are unlikely to be acclaimed by general readers, but their poetry still seems to successfully reflect the conditions of postmodernist society. To approach their poetry, we have to be ready to understand language, the world, and the self in a very radical way. As much as language poetry upsets established notions of them, it contributes to the openness of life.

언어시, 비지시성, 난해시, 반환원주의적 충동, 미국시, language poetry, referential opaqueness, difficult poems, anti-reductionist impulse, American poetry

박수정 Soojeong Park

DOI: Vol.63(No.4) 799-821, 2017

“Ideology” is generally defined as a coherent or loosely organized set of ideas which is the expression of the special interests of some class or social group. This paper concentrates on each ideology in Louis Althusser and Paul de Man as well as the ideology as “German ideology” named by Karl Marx. The connection of ideology with literary criticism can be established when the ideology built in text is analyzed by means of the theory of literary criticism. Given the fact, this paper aims to investigate the ideologies and present them as the motivators for the social practice of literary criticism. For this purpose, First of all, the ideologies are examined. Second, it is argued that the device, distanciation and theatricality between text and readers is that of revealing the ideology in the text, which does not stagnate at the state of the aesthetic effect, but goes forward to the motivator for the social practice. Third, this analysis method is illustrated through the poetical works of William Wordsworth, the Romantic poet. Finally I show the exemplary performance where reading ideology leads to social practice, and suggest the significance of uncovering the ideology in literary text.

이데올로기, 거리두기, 극장성, 텍스트, 문학비평이론의 사회적 실천, ideology, distanciation, theatricality, text, social practice of literary criticism

진명희 Myunghee Jin

DOI: Vol.63(No.4) 823-840, 2017

Virginia Woolf incessantly imposes on the readers such philosophical questions as what a reality is, what life is, what a truth is, and what a relationship between knowledge and perception is, among many others. David Hume’s separation of object and subject and his consequent skepticism is critiqued in To The Lighthouse by the kitchen table which is the example of stability independent of perceiving circumstances and subjects. In Hume’s skepticism the table does not exist as an object when we do not perceive it. However, if for Mr. Ramsay the table is the example of the object separate from the perceiving intelligent beings, it is, for Lily and Mrs Ramsay, the place of communion, communication, and vision, unifying subject and object inseparably. Woolf says of the table in Lily’s words that in the ordinary experience of a chair and a table they are perceived as objective things, yet at the same time they are experienced as miracles and ecstasies in and by the transforming power of imagination. The things as they are, are transformed into what they might have been by and in imagination. This possible world is where art comes into. In fine, Woolf’s kitchen table in the novel is pivotal to the understanding of her artistic vision and the question of representation. What matters for Woolf after all is not the formal or factual relations but the narrative/relative relations and reconfiguration of things observed.

『등대로』, 식탁, 예술적 상상력, 데이비드 흄, 사물성, To the Lighthouse, kitchen table, artistic imagination, David Hume, thingness