한서린 교수

This essay raises the question of creaturely right and its cosmopolitan possibilities in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein by arguing that the novel’s awareness toward the creaturely condition of earthly life allows us to imagine universal hospitality in the most radical sense. Exploring how the novel identifies the creature as the bearer of life and the creator as the sovereign, this essay’s reading opens another way to discuss the question of power and life beyond Foucauldian and Agambenian perspect

In light of recent critical attention to the Haitian Revolution and its relation to Enlightenment universalism, backed by a continuation of scholarly attempts to reconstruct transatlantic histories, this essay analyzes William Wordsworth’s two sonnets written in response to the historical circumstances of 1802. In “To Toussaint L’Ouverture” Wordsworth eulogizes the famed leader of the first slave revolution, posing him as a figure who exposes the violent underside of European Enlightenment as he

This essay offers a reading of Keats via the twentieth-century Korean poet Kim Yeong-Nang to mark the diacritical difference of English Romanticism as modern and Western. Kim belonged to a coterie of writers working to modernize Korean poetry under the influence of Western literature. Keats’s aestheticism particularly inspired Kim, for whom Romanticism became a site of reflection about the very meaning of modern literature. Revisiting Keats’s poetry through Kim’s eyes, this essay traces the othe

This essay rereads Percy Bysshe Shelley`s A Philosophical View of Reform to explore its cosmopolitan implications in light of Britain`s recent decision to leave the European Union. The Peterloo Massacre in 1819, which gave impetus to Shelley`s vindication of social and parliamentary reforms in this prose work, becomes an important platform for investigating the root cause of the nation`s oppressive and exploitative climate. The fraudulent measures that the new aristocracy takes to accumulate wea

In light of recent critical attention to the Haitian Revolution and its relation to Enlightenment universalism, backed by a continuation of scholarly attempts to reconstruct transatlantic histories, this essay analyzes William Wordsworth’s two sonnets written in response to the historical circumstances of 1802. In “To Toussaint L’Ouverture” Wordsworth eulogizes the famed leader of the first slave revolution, posing him as a figure who exposes the violent underside of European Enlightenment as he

Reading Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray as a novel that performs Foucault’s idea of discursive formation, this essay explores various formal aspects of discursive formation as figured by the novel’s statements, most notably the highly stylized epigrams. Words in the novel, I argue, operate at the level of the surface, converging from different disciplines to give shape to Dorian Gray, who with his two faces emerges as a de-subjectified “type” of the new discourse of Hedonism. At the sit

In response to the ongoing critical interest in Kant’s idea of “cosmopolitan right” and the increasing post‐structuralist interest in the rhetoric of his political writings, this essay analyzes the rhetorical strategy of analogy Kant employs in “Toward Perpetual Peace” to figure forth the transcendental idea of perpetual peace, reason’s end with no empirical referent yet, as a cosmopolitan right in accord with the material and empirical conditions of nature and politics. The formal analogy betwe

This essay explores the question of the body and addiction raised by Immanuel Kant and Samuel Taylor Coleridge as they fashion themselves into modern subjects. While studies of the philosophical connection between Kant and Coleridge have well been established, the somewhat counterintuitive relationship between the health-mongering Kant and the opium addict Coleridge has not drawn enough critical attention. Looking closely at the ways in which Kant and Coleridge attend to their bodies, this essay

The aim of this essay is to revisit Derrida’s notion of the carnivorous subject and the question of eating well through the trope of cannibalism in Byron’s Don Juan. Cannibalism is an extreme form of flesh eating, which exposes for Byron the voracious underbelly of an economic and political system that feeds on the human flesh. Evidently, the most atrocious manifestation of such rapacious appetite for the human flesh is war, and the urgency with which Byron condemns carnage in military conflicts

This essay contemplates the reparative possibilities of the performative body that feels and touches. A loose, and perhaps unexpected, assemblage of literary texts coinciding with the rise of modern epistemology in and around the Enlightenment movement will demonstrate a surprisingly persistent awareness of how the body performs against dominant ideology. More specifically, we will look at the trope of the hand that touches instead of makes or writes to explore how the tactile act and senses int