• 영어영문학
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• 제58권6호
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• pp.1001-1021
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• 2012

This paper is concerned with John Ashbery's poetics of difficulty, questioning in particular the nature of communication in his difficult poems. Ashbery has an idea of poetry as 'information' to be transmitted to the reader. Meaning, however, is to be created by a series of selections among equally probable choices. Ashbery's poetry has been characterized by resistance to the interpretive system of meaning. But the resistance itself, as I will argue, can be an effective medium of communication as the communicated message is not simply transmitted but 'selected' and thus created by the reader. In Ashbery's poetry, disruptive 'noise' elements can be processed as constructive information. What is normally considered a hindrance or noise can be reversed and added to the information. In Ashbery's poems, random ambiguities or noises can be effectively integrated into the final structure of meaning. Such a stochastic sense of information transfer has been embodied in Ashbery's idea of creating a network of verbal elements in his poetry, analogous to the interconnecting web of hypertext, the most dynamic medium 'information technology' has brought to us. John Ashbery, whose poems are simultaneously incomprehensible and intelligent, employs ambiguities or noise in his poetry, with an attempt to reach through linear language to express nonlinear realities. It is therefore my intention to examine Ashbery's poetics of difficulty, from a perspective of communication transmission, using the theories of information technology and the principles of hypertext theory. Ashbery's poetry raises precisely the problem confronted in the era of communication and information technology. The paper will also show how his aesthetics of difficulty reflects the culture of our uncertain times with overflowing information. With his difficult enigmatic poems, Ashbery was able to move ahead of the technological advances of his time to propose a new way of perceiving the world and life.

• 영어영문학
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• 제56권6호
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• pp.1119-1133
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• 2010

This paper explores Myung Mi Kim's poetics of the archive in Commons. Commons begins with a gesture that critiques a prior act of archivization: "Here, this speck and this speck that you missed." As the poems accrue in the book, Commons demonstrates the desire to record those experiences that have been neglected by the architects of traditional archives while at the same time interrogating the very logic of the archive. Crucial to that interrogation is the poetic form. Kim's attempt to archive silences and gaps leads to a radical experiment with form and language. It reformulates the archive as an open system amenable to interruption, extension, and revision. I examine in detail the techniques that contribute to her poetics of the archive, a poetics that draws the readers out of the narrow confines of their personal experiences and their political identities. By juxtaposing Kim's poems with her statements of poetics given as interviews, this paper connects the project of Commons to Kim's larger concern with open form and experimental writing. I argue that the "difficulty" of her poetry should be reinterpreted as a demand that her text makes on the readers to broaden their terms of engagement. The linguistic experiment of Commons provides an occasion to rethink the habitual ways in which time is experienced, national histories are written, and literary works are consumed.

• 영어영문학
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• 제64권2호
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• pp.171-185
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• 2018

Students and other new readers of modernist poetry often experience difficulty with the influential early work of Ezra Pound. Although these typically brief poems may appear (deceptively) simple, an understanding of the relationship between Imagism and Vorticism is crucial to reading-or teaching-them effectively, which in turn requires significant familiarity with relevant poetics theories as well as representative poems. This essay clarifies the complex relations Imagism and Vorticism as two distinct styles that are too often conflated to the detriment of an accurate understanding of either one (and, in consequence, of the later modernist poetry that builds on their discoveries). In order to elucidate the modernists' justification of free verse over traditional metrical composition, I begin with an elaboration of T. E. Hulme's 1911 theory of the "cheerful, dry, and sophisticated" modern classicism on which both Imagism and Vorticism were largely predicated, developing Hulme's important distinction between the version of classicism that is "static" (and gives rise to Imagism) and the one that is "dynamic" (and leads to Vorticism and beyond it). In the following two sections, I draw upon and synthesize a broad range of Pound's own poetics statements to reveal the evolution of first sound ("melopoeia") and then the image ("phanopoeia") throughout his early work. Although the body of this article is analytical and historical in nature, it concludes with a practical template prompt for a creative response assignment, appropriate to undergraduate and graduate students, designed to help new readers recognize for themselves how Vorticist art works and why it matters.

• 영어영문학
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• 제57권4호
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• pp.529-552
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• 2011

My essay aims at reading Ginsberg's "Howl" and "Kaddish" with the concept of 'shaman-prophet-poet' to illustrate the dynamic relationship between his poetics and radical politics. Throughout his widely-ranging career, Ginsberg represents himself as a poet-prophet and commands a typical rhetoric of revelation as a way of decentering Cold War orthodoxies. While well aware of the oppressive and pervasive power of the dominant post-war ideologies, he adopts 'madness' to oppose conventional political, social, and religious institutions; by way of entering into the madness of this world and actively engaging himself as a victim, he can finally heal both himself and the world. This dual function of poet characterizes his rhetoric of revelation, but it doesn't appeal to the mainstream of American critical ideology where the post-structural approach to language and subject gives a skeptical look at any account of active human agency and humanistic belief in the possibility of language. In "Howl" and "Kaddish," Ginsburg persuades the reader of the truth of his own vision through the convincing and realistic portraits of his contemporaries as well as his own mother and family. Different from his visionary predecessors such as Emerson and Whitman, Ginsberg knew the difficulty of a negotiation between history and divine vision, and attempted to imbricate his family, friends, and even the larger social and political units within his visionary experience in order to avoid naive idealism, escapism, or solipsism. Furthermore, he deconstructs the Logos of Western prophecy and replaces it with the groundless identity and the nontheistic epistemology of Buddhism, which, in turn, leads to emptying his powerful language of absolutist meaning and prevents his prophecy from becoming re-reified as divine essentialism. Ginsberg's idea of poet and poem revitalizes the skeptical view on language and literary representation of our contemporary critical community which is unwilling to engage the experimental scope of his radical prophecy.

• 비교문화연구
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• 제45권
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• pp.219-243
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• 2016

앙토냉 아르토의 삶은 잔혹한 실존의 드라마이다. 그는 고통이 투사된 정신적 삶을 살았다. 이 논문은 언어의 수형자로서 아르토의 글쓰기에 나타난 사유의 궤적을 살펴본 것이다. 아르토는 평생 말과 사물, 존재와 사유의 관계 사이에서 번민한 시인이다. 그는 존재의 신비를 일상의 언어로 옮길 때마다 정신적 고뇌에 사로잡혔다. 그의 시적 사유는 주체성의 상실에 따른 해체의 여정으로 향한다. 그럼에도 불구하고 그는 세상을 언어로 포착할 수밖에 없는 운명을 타고났다. 아르토는 젊은 시절 정신병을 앓았다. 우리는 그 병을 시적 창작의 어려움과 결부시켜 살폈다. 여기서는 아르토와 리비에르가 주고받은 편지 내용들을 중심으로 분석했다. 시인은 "영혼의 중심의 붕괴, 일종의 근본적이고 달아나는 사유의 침식"을 언급하며 언어적 표현의 무능력을 토로한다. 그 이후 아르토의 불안한 정신적 징후는 지속된다. 그는 정신착란이 최악의 상태에 이르러도 의식만큼은 잃지 않았다. 그것은 아르토의 글쓰기에 그대로 나타난다. 또 그의 종교적 성향은 불안정한 정신을 반영한다. 멕시코 타라후마라 지방 여행 중엔 원시신앙인 페요틀의 의식(儀式)에 집착하고 주술에 경도되기도 했다. 그의 비기독교적 신관은 신비주의적 성향에서 비롯한 것이다. 아르토는 마지막 순간까지 글쓰기를 포기하지 않았다. 아르토의 정신착란은 엄밀한 의미에서 광기가 아니다. 비록 광기라고 해도 그것은 은유적이다. 그것은 아르토가 자신의 한계를 거부하는 데서 나오며, 육체가 절대적 감각과의 동일시 속에서 자신을 한데 모으려는 열망에서 비롯한다. 그의 지적 능력은 오히려 극도로 고양된 상태에서 더욱 잘 드러났다. 아르토의 광기는 심오한 사색가의 그것과 다를 바 없다. 정신착란을 겪은 시인들의 삶은 그렇지 않은 시인들보다 더욱 시적이다. 아르토의 정상을 벗어난 감정은 우리 자신의 한계, 무력함, 체념 등을 측정할 수 있게 한다. 그래서 그의 절규는 비분절의 고함이지만, 다른 병자의 그것과 성격이 다르다. 왜 우리가 아르토의 작품에 관심을 갖고 천착하는가의 이유가 거기에 있다.