• 영어영문학
• /
• 제58권2호
• /
• pp.189-215
• /
• 2012

This paper reads Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) in light of the 18th-century understanding of 'sympathy' including those of Hume and Smith and also in light of what Michael Hardt in our century has called "affective labor." I argue that the imaginative capacity and "seeing" are crucial in understanding Smith's idea of 'sympathy.' By showing how the monster's ugliness precludes any human character from sympathizing with him, Mary Shelley exposes that Smith's idea of sympathy fails to maintain social harmony. Mary Shelley revises Smith's 'sympathy' and makes it more radical by suggesting that the active affective labor could bridge the epistemological distance lying between the agent concerned and the impartial spectator. I first read Smith's idea of sympathy as an imaginative capacity which is inevitably influenced by 'seeing' and visual perception. Then I analyze the scenes in which the creature in Frankenstein fails to acquire any human sympathy due to his ugliness, and show how the specular nature of 'sympathy' is disrupted when one party is visually ugly and deformed. I conclude that affective labor and active moral reflection on the part of the spectator need to be provided when the agent concerned is 'ugly' and thus challenges our habitual epistemological boundary. Shelley's re-evaluation of Smith's sympathy, thus, suggests that affective labor may not be something that women alone have to perform, but an ethical practice that concerns all human beings and that can transform the otherwise flawed human capacity for sympathy.

• 영어영문학
• /
• 제64권2호
• /
• pp.203-217
• /
• 2018

Both in terms of frequency and importance, sympathy is one of the most central themes that Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) delves into. While not a few critics have written on the subject, one crucially important aspect has been overlooked in the previous discussions of sympathy in Frankenstein: Shelley's critical intervention in the term's long lasting association with the notion of one body from a single origin. Focusing on the novel's central theme of sympathy, my paper addresses this oversight in the existing Frankenstein scholarship. I argue that Shelley's main agenda regarding sympathy in the novel is to problematize the logic of self-reproduction implicit in the notion of sympathy as an essentially familial tie. The reading of the novel as a warning against human violation of nature has been prevalent both in academia and popular culture. Nonetheless, in terms of sympathy, this paper offers an alternative reading in which the novel questions, not valorizes, the naturalization of nature. Far from valorizing the inviolable sacredness of nature, I argue, Frankenstein is a literary project attempting to disassociate sympathy from the natural bond that one is born into, and instead, re-associate it with fellowship as a second-nature to be continuously reinvented and reeducated.

• 영어영문학
• /
• 제57권1호
• /
• pp.51-72
• /
• 2011

This paper explores the issue of strangers and of hospitality in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, based on Kant's concept of hospitality as "the right of a stranger" and on Derrida's discussion of hospitality. It first examines the similarities between the domestic relations within the Frankenstein family and Frankenstein's relation to the monster: an effort to create unity out of a multiplicity of elements, and what can be called a "debt economy." Then, reading the animation scene of the monster as a version of the advent of a stranger, it deals with the question of hospitality. More specifically, the arrival of Clerval immediately follows the animation of the monster because it effectively dramatizes the paradox that there is no hospitality without hostility. The opposition and the apposition between hospitality and hostility are also seen in the De Lacey family's welcoming Safie and rejecting the monster. Frankenstein's failure and the De Lacey family's failure to welcome the monster show that hospitality as "right" exemplified by Kantian hospitality does not apply to a stranger like the monster who has neither name nor relation and who is categorized into what Derrida terms "an absolute other." This paper also looks at Safie's problematic subversion against her father, which loses its subversive charge in the context of racial relations between Turkish Mahometans and European Christians. Safie's father looms large in the context of the issue of hospitality because his episode suggests that the category of race causes hospitality to malfunction.

• 영어영문학
• /
• 제58권1호
• /
• pp.93-115
• /
• 2012

The decades after the French Revolution witnessed the prolific production and consumption of apocalyptic literature, tinged with the optimistic vision of political progress and human perfectibility. However, the Romantic writers were cautious to embrace the idea of the end of history, even though it promised an aesthetic space relieved of historical determinants. Mary Shelley's The Last Man joined this line of Romantic literature which skeptically questions the millenarian desires of political apocalypse by representing apocalypse without millenium. Using the theme of apocalypse as a tool to investigate the place of human beings in the universe and to test diverse political reform ideas to their fullest potential, the novel diagnoses the ideas of representative political subject as the most problematic aspect of political structure. The notion of subjecthood presupposes a political decision as to who can be counted as subject and this decision, according to the novel, assumed a subject that is "active, free, conscious and willful sovereign," which Raymond embodies in his exemplary body. Against the sovereignty of Raymond is juxtaposed the subaltern subject such as Sybil. The resistance of Sybil to Apollo, another exemplary subject, is the subtext of the novel, which guides the way out of the grim future of humanity. While the plague exemplifies the universalizing ideal with its principle of sovereignty, Sybil and her descendent Lionel practice the unconditional hospitality so that they can renew the community in a way to embrace singularities of individuals.

• 영어영문학
• /
• 제54권4호
• /
• pp.483-509
• /
• 2008

For the last decades, criticism on Frankenstein has tried to make a link between Victor's Creature and Rousseaurean "man in a state of nature." Like the Rousseaurean savage in a state of animal, the monster has only basic instincts least needed for his survival, i.e. self-preservation, but turns into a civilized man after learning language. Most critics argue that, despite the monster's acquisition of language, his failure in entry into a cultural and linguistic community is the outcome of a lack of sympathy for him by others, which displays the stark existence of epistemological barriers between them. That is to say, the monster imagines his being the same as others in the pre-linguistic stage but, in the linguistic stage, he realizes that he is different from others. Interpreting the Rousseaurean idea of language, which appears in his writings, as much more focused on emotion than many critics think, I read the dispute between Victor and his Creature as a variation of parent-offspring conflict. Shelley criticizes Rousseau's parental negligence in putting his children into a foundling hospital and leaving them dying there. The monster's revenge on uncaring Victor parallels the likely retaliation Rousseau's displaced children would perform against Rousseau, which Shelley imaginatively reproduces in her novel. The conflict between the monster and Victor is due to a disrupted attachment between parent and child in terms of Darwinian developmental psychology. Affective asynchrony between parent and child, which refers to a state of lack of mutual favorable feelings, accounts for numerous dysfunctional families. This paper shifts a focus from a semiotics-oriented perspective on the monster's social isolation to a Darwinian perspective, drawing attention to emotional problems transpiring in familial interactions. In doing so, it finds that language is a means of communicating one's internal emotions to others along with other means such as facial expressions and body movements. It also demonstrates that how to promote emotional well-being in either familial or social relationships entirely depends on the way in which one employs language that can entail either pleasure or anger on hearers' part.

• 대중서사연구
• /
• 제27권2호
• /
• pp.45-77
• /
• 2021

코로나19 바이러스의 여파가 계속되고 있다. 다양한 예방과 방역의 조치들 이면에는 '내가 감염될지 모른다'는 공포와 '누군가가 나를 감염시킬지도 모른다'는 공포, 두 가지 공포가 잠재되어 있다. 이러한 잠재의식은 감염 상상력 위에서 이루어진다. 본 논문은 우리의 감염 상상력에 영향을 미친 SF 서사와 좀비 서사들을 분석하고자 하였다. SF 소설과 영화들이 '감염'을 어떻게 이해하고 표현하였는지, 그리고 좀비 서사들은 '감염'과 그 공포를 어떻게 드러내고 있는지를 살펴보고자 한 것이다. 메리 셸리의 소설 『최후의 인간』은 감염병의 공포가 인류에게 성찰의 기회를 제공한 역설을 드러내주었다. 영화 <컨테이젼>과 <감기>는 감염병에 대한 공포와 혐오가 폭동과 충돌로 이어질 수 있음을 보여주었다. 좀비 서사는 감염이 주는 공포를 가장 극적으로 표현한 장르이다. <부산행>을 비롯한 연상호 감독의 좀비 3부작은 가까운 주변 사람이 가장 위협적인 감염원으로 돌변할 수 있음을 드러낸다. 우리는 SF와 좀비 서사를 통해, 감염병 앞에서 인류가 겸허한 연대의식과 윤리의식, 공감능력을 갖추어야 함을 깨달을 수 있다. 이러한 서사를 통해 우리는 감염 상상력의 중요성을 깨달을 수 있다. 감염 상상력은 감염 확산의 원인과 결과, 그리고 그 과정과 향후 전망에 대한 이해의 기반이 되는 인식 체계가 된다.