• 영어영문학
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• 제60권2호
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• pp.339-363
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• 2014

This essay reconsiders the subject of Romantic self-consciousness in a post-de Manian perspective. Self-consciousness is an attribute of Romantic lyricism whereby the poetic speaker I remains conscious of how (s)he feels or lives here and now. This self-reflective feature of Romantic poetry has been controversially interpreted either as self-centered solipsism or as self-expressive objectivism. The question is stirring more disputes among Romantic critics after the advent of New Historicism and Feminism. These two historicistic approaches reprove Romantic poetry for a lack of the sense of history and ascribes it to Romantic self-consciousness. They argue that Romantic poets in general displace historical materiality into an object of internal consciousness, so negating absurd social realities "merely to gain their own immortal soul." This essay targets to overcome this negative stance on Romantic self-consciousness with a "subversive" return to Paul de Man's criticism of Romantic internality.

• 영미문화
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• 제17권2호
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• pp.89-109
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• 2017

This study focuses upon the fact that Wordsworth has a great interest in the epistemological understanding of nature. It denies that his early poems, such as An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches, only represent the subtleties of nature, according to the picturesque mode of the eighteenth century, without any other consideration about human mind. It tries to trace his effort to deal with the relationship between nature and mind, which is committed to the apprehension of Wordsworth's experience which shapes much of his later work. Prior to Wordsworth, or in his earlier days, both the picturesque description and the descriptive poetry tend to be two-dimensional. Staying away from the cold rules of painting and overcoming passivity, he prefers to contemplate nature through his emotions and tries to come close to the sublime sense. Therefore, his poetic strategy is to show that his poetic description of nature goes beyond the limits which these picturesque rules and colors impose. His readers get the feeling of how desperate he become trying to choose the suitable poetic language to express the relationship between nature and mind. He also has an interest in developing a character, Dorothy, to match what he thinks and to mediate what he intends to describe through his epistemological understanding of nature.

• 영어영문학
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• 제57권5호
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• pp.701-725
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• 2011

This paper attempts to read "The Nightingale" as an experimental proponent of Lyrical Ballads of 1798, one that inaugurated British Romanticism. It is never accidental for this poem to come to replace "Lewti" at the last moment of publication and to be tied to the poetic principles manifested in the "Advertisement" of the 1798 volume. The speaker of this poem, for example, is an ordinary man, who presents himself as a friend and a loving father. Opting for conversational styles rather than blindly copying literary conceits, he even incorporates an evening episode he happens to recall into a legitimate subject matter. The notion of "conversation," which appears in the subtitle, offers a key to figuring out the ideal of poetic language, the figure of the poet, and compositional procedures Coleridge and Wordsworth proposed in their collaborative project. "The Nightingale" can be a dubious, if not totally failed, poetical journey to subverting an incidence of misnaming acts. He finally reaches the limits of poetic figuration in a process of textualizing nature. The leitmotif of "In nature there is nothing melancholy" testifies to the fact that the bird nightingale, which the narrator is hard at work to rename as a joyous bird, is nothing but a poetic metaphor. "The Nightingale" is more likely to be a revisional, regenerative performance based on the strategy of conversation than an embodiment of a daring novelty.

• 영어영문학
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• 제56권5호
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• pp.973-998
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• 2010

This paper aims at assessing the significance of Lyrical Ballads of 1798, the agreed inaugurator of English Romanticism, in terms of such key concepts as poetic "experiments," "conversation," and the authorial function. The 1798 volume marks an interesting incidence in which an author with no tangible substantiality can wield his authorial function over his works. The volume is signed without the named proper noun-its author is neither William Wordsworth nor Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The figure of the author in this case is realized by the poems he writes; he produces, and is produced by, his works-a fact that constitutes part of the poetic experiments manifested in the Advertisement. Working under this reciprocal production, the Author of the 1798 volume and his poems are collectively aiming at establishing a new class of poetry and an interpretive community. The notion of "conversation" is a key element in the thematic, stylistic ties among individual poems. Poems of the 1798 volume effect multi-layered, "blended" voices. Readers are expected to draw out the topological interweaving among poems through the practices of dialogic reading. In this light, the sequential necessity of "The Rime" and "Tintern Abbey" should be emphasized. They are stitched together in a logic of textual placement and the transition from one to the other is never arbitrary. Most of all, they are working under the same authorial function, complementing each other, and addressing the same poetic project in different textual locations. As an inaugural work of English Romanticism, Lyrical Ballads of 1798 in fact makes so many things happen and yet again anticipates something yet to come with elusiveness. The value of this poetic experiments should be judged not only by what is claimed in it, but what it sets out to do and "how far" it will be performed, as implied in the Advertisement. The efficacy of the volume, more than anything else, is dependent upon the performative power of words.