• Journal of English Language & Literature
• /
• v.58 no.1
• /
• pp.43-67
• /
• 2012

My essay aims at illustrating Whitman's homosexual vision of utopia with a close reading of his representative homosexual text, Calamus. His expansive self is based upon his intimate contact with the world and is almost always drawn to a wider vision of community in which different individuals share the locus of commonness and reach beyond their empirical boundaries. While foregrounding the contingent and the singular, Whitman forges bonds with other people through a series of ecstatic moments that carry us into the public sphere and common interests. Contrary to the current Whitman studies, his homosexual text doesn't repress contingency in order to celebrate the universal, but fully develops the commensurability among diverse historical agents. Whitman knows well the social taboos and inhibitions at the time of national crisis and expansion, but keeps imagining the world where homosexuality plays a central and significant role in founding a democratic solidarity and achieving a desirable social structure. His ideal of America is not a deferred wish for the future, but a concrete vision that can be achieved here and now, realized by the spontaneous bonding and instant attraction among free men. Instead of interpreting history or suggesting practical alternatives, he keeps questioning the dominant ideologies and the given orders of social control, and suggests a free and open relationship among men where no exterior power or mediating other intervenes. His utopian vision is radical as well as ideal, in that it rejects the interventions of the power structure and its institutions and courageously inscribes his homosexuality in the process of writing about and reading his contemporary America. As a predecessor of a homosexual utopian vision of America, Whitman has inspired many later poets, showing a possibility of infusing a homosexual identity into a radical imaging of the nation and its future.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
• /
• v.9 no.spc
• /
• pp.167-184
• /
• 2003

This paper is to analyze how Walt Whitman developed the theme and structure of Leaves of Grass with his ideal of democratic vistas. Whitman established his identity as an inspired poet, having faith in the divinity of man based on transcendental belief. After being awakened to the transcendental truth, he practiced his own common world view--his democratic vistas. Whitman searched for the unity with nature and identified his self with "common man and his nation." The poetry expresses "cosmological and national ideology" dedicated to the creation of an ideal nation united in eternal freedom and peace. By portraying common cosmic and national theme in terms of his individual personality, he brought various paradoxical and controversial ideas into one thing, namely "democracy", fusing diversity into unity. As in the symbol of the grass, there is a unity in variety reflected by democracy in a cosmological and political compound. With the form of free verse, he could express his liberal unrestrained and mystical thoughts of democracy. This new form has been associated with the poet's strong consciousness of the need for modernization in his country. He willingly assumed "the role of prophet and public voice for American democrat" with the rolling catalogues and I-persona which formed a sense of the common man and common things of America. Whitman pioneered a democrat literature with simple and dynamic tone and style. He successively pursued the democratic vistas in his Leaves of Grass.

• English & American cultural studies
• /
• v.18 no.2
• /
• pp.79-104
• /
• 2018

Chung Ji Yong is a well-known poet in the Japanese Occupation Period firstly as a lyrical and traditional poet as a member of the literary journal Simunhak(Poetry Literature) along with Park Yong Chul and Kim Young Rang and later as a prominent modernist poet in the late years of the Period. He is always highly estimated as a poet of pictorial images and lyricism, but his ardor for translations, especially Walt Whitman has been neglected so far. Before him, Ju Yohan, Yi Kwang Soo, Yi Un Sang, Kim Hyung Won and many other poets and critics had been interested in Whitman's democratic ideas and his poems. Chung Ji Young also translated Whitman's three poems in the hard days of 1930s. After the Imperial Japan surrendered to the Allied forces on 15 August 1945, ending 35 years of Japanese occupation, Korea was under the American forces and Russian troops. In this critical days of Korean's debating only one korea or separated Koreas, strangely enough, Chung ji Yong fully immersed in translating Whitman's poems only for four years as an English literature professor just before being abducted by North Korean Army, while almost discarding his own poetic ability and sense of duty as a leading poet in the literary circle with only just a few exceptions. Why did Chung Ji Yong focused on the translation of Whitman's poems in this important period as a poet and intellectual in the newly independent country? He may want to warn people too much ideological conflicts or at least express his frustration through translating Whitman's poems. Until now, academic endeavors on Chung Ji Yong's poems and life are focused on his lyrical and modernistic works of the Japanese Occupation Period and naturally little interested in the days of Independence period and his true motivations on translating Whitman's poems. As a proposal, this short article can be a minor trigger for the sincere efforts of Chung Ji Yong's last days.

• The Journal of the Convergence on Culture Technology
• /
• v.5 no.4
• /
• pp.79-85
• /
• 2019

'Experiments in Art and Technology' Group was established in the mid-20th century, and then developed the larger interdisciplinary experiments into the range of art world and its outside field. The motive power of group's activities was the collaboration between artists and engineers traversing the boundary between old different disciplinary conventions. E.A.T was officially launched in 1967 by the engineers Billy $Kl{\ddot{u}}ver$ and Fred Waldhauer and the artists Robert Raushenberg and Robert Whitman. They performed various possibility of material, technology, and engineering available to contemporary art. By reflecting the function of art and technology in society, eventually they developed the methodology of new aesthetics which had organic relationship with contemporary world. In this sense, this research have its academic significance. This paper firstly examined the socio-cultural context of emerging the E.A.T. group as a representative model for convergent practice, and verified the fact that the collaboration between artists and engineers had produced the expansion of artistic expression as well as new relationship among art, engineering, and society by considering E.A.T's various projects. Therefore, I will refer the E.A.T. group as an exemplary model for concrete method of collaboration that contemporary discourses about convergence need.