• English & American cultural studies
• /
• v.10 no.2
• /
• pp.149-207
• /
• 2010

Written simultaneously with Prometheus Unbound, Shelley's "Julian & Maddalo" is a masterwork of dramatic poiesis, of doubling embedded in its couplets, dialogic debate on human nature and contrasted symbolic emblems. The emblems mirror each other and are themselves sites of generative paradox: the "heaven illumined" but "dreary tower" of the Maniac and the glorious sunsets on the "ever-shifting sand" of the Lido, a wasteland that is a place of self discovery but also of "abandonment" and barren mingling figured, inter alia, in its "amphibious weeds," a trope of the poem's personae. This essay also explores the poem's dramatic structure and various rhetorical devices, beginning with the Preface, a threshold of complex identity disguise that Shelley uses for veiled self-presentation, as in "Alastor," mirroring and literary references replete with nuanced ironies. I focus mainly on the complex figures of liminality Shelley uses to develop his own thoughts (as well as his ongoing debates with Byron) about man's potential for growth in thought, insight and empathy, in political reform and interpersonal and individual healing. Advancing Shelley's most optimistic ideas, Julian, escorted by Maddalo observes the Maniac, -- a living ruin whose pained eloquence reveals the link of eros to poiesis and the limits of the latter's ability to 'transform a world.' The Maniac is the core of muse-work (remembering, thinking and song) and Shelley presents him as its emblem. He also is prefigured in and reflects the quintessentially liminal Lido with its "barren embrace" of sea and land. Yet it is less the Maniac's feeling that his grief is "charactered in vain…on this unfeeling leaf" than Julian's rationales for leaving the site of pain that point to Shelley's final comment on poetry's transformative limits. As the primary haploids of the drama's meiosis re-combine and two of them, Maddalo and the maniac fall away, an analogy I briefly develop and embedded in the erotic dynamics of poiesis, Shelley suggests, as he did at the beginning of his poetic lyricism in "Alastor" and at its end in "the Triumph of Life"that images mislead and delude; that "the deep truth is imageless" and redemption is not in but beyond figuration.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
• /
• v.15 no.2
• /
• pp.163-176
• /
• 2015

This study aims to decode newly 'Mojookjirangga' of the Sillian songs on higher viewpoint that is to integrate previous decodings; furthermore to discuss a musical composition of the Sillian song. So to speak, when we read 'hoe(廻)' as 'gam(감)-' instead of 'dol(돌)-' in the song 'Mojookjirangga' which was written in Chinese Characters, such a decoding contributes largely to grip the deep meaning-structure of the elegiac song. Consequently we are able to sing that 'Mojookjirangga' according to the characteristics of national music. However the characteristics of national music are 1) the length of a phrase makes a rhythm, 2) the first beat is strong beat and becomes more and more weak, 3) there are shaking sounds on the long rhythm and changing vowels, 4) there is deep and great dignity in those national music songs. Then we can find those characteristics easily at Sijo-songs. In fact, the Sillian songs and Sijo-songs of Chosun period are more popular music. Then we are going to sing 'Mojookjirangga', referring to the method of Sijo-song and the characteristics of national music. Nowadays such an attempt is to contribute to enrich our national culture and to make the global Korean-stream more abundant.