Walsh Kelly S.

Although Pak T’aewŏn expressed his appreciation for Ulysses and the “experimental nature of James Joyce’s writing” in a 1934 article, there have been relatively few critical attempts to bridge his 1934 novella, A Day in the Life of Kubo the Novelist (Sosŏlga Kubo Ssi ŭi iril), and Joyce’s 1922 epic modernist novel. And most of these have been limited to discussions of their diurnal structures and the motif of the urban wanderer, or flâneur, in the modern colonial city. So while Pak does not emul

“Aesthetics,” writes Deleuze, “suffers from a wrenching duality. On the one hand, it designates the theory of sensibility as the form of possible experience; on the other hand, it designates the theory of art as the reflection of real experience.” That is, Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment uses “aesthetics” in reference to the experience of the beautiful, while in Critique of Pure Reason, the term denotes his theory in which space and time are constitutive of sensory experience. In the di

Jean Toomer’s Cane has long been recognized as a singular work of American modernism, mixing prose, lyric poetry, black spirituals, and drama to forge an aesthetic search for African American self-realization. In staging the failure of black characters to achieve this by rooting themselves in the soil and rustic life of Georgia, I argue, Cane enacts a complex pastoralism, which focalizes the dissonant and pervasive doubleness of black life in an age of technological transformation. With bifurcat

Gerald Murnane is a singular figure in Australian literature, forging filiations with European writers to write books “about landscapes.” His landscapes, though, are elusive, the fleeting, ever-shifting product of the mind’s effort to order and interpret the environment, and landscape persistently distances and estranges his characters from the land. While Murnane has described his fictions as efforts “to bring to light an underlying order,” his metafictional poetics of landscape never achieves

Virginia Woolf’s poetics of loss has long been recognized for its contradictory qualities, which make her elegiac works so singular, vital, and open-ended. Her “fiction-elegies” mourn for losses that are past and those that may come to pass; they register the “blows” of loss, both individual and collective, and aesthetically shape them; they use loss as a creative spur in the effort to overcome it and achieve some sort of wholeness. While this complex “grief work” is self-avowedly inconclusive,

“The ugly fact,” said Cormac McCarthy in an interview, “is books are made out of books.” For several decades, critics have been seeking out the specific intertextual sources that abound in McCarthy’s works, with Melville, Faulkner, and Hemingway considered to be his closest forebears. In the case of The Road, critics have identified a number of romantic and modernist intertexts; no one, however, has investigated the role that Keats’s odes and Joyce’s Ulysses play in McCarthy’s novel, the reason

In Claudia Rankine’s award-winning collage poem, Citizen: An American Lyric (2014), I argue, the ongoing, inconclusive labor of registering and resisting racial and patriarchal hierarchies entails a complex formalism. The text, that is, asserts the persistence of what Caroline Levine calls “constraining forms” and makes insistent, lyrical appeals for the shaping of new, less harmful ones. To fully appreciate the political and ethical force of this modern-day, African-American lyric, I also conte

조르주 뒤뛰 (Georges Duthuit) 와의 대화에서 사무엘 베케트는 그의 예술적 정언명령이 “표현할 대상도, 수단도 없으며, 표현의 가능성이나 힘도 욕망도 없이, 표현해야할 의무와 더불어” 지속되는 어떤 것으로 묘사하고 있다. 주요 작품들을 불어로 쓴 아일랜드 태생의 베케트는 자신의 작품을 추후 영어로 번역하며 모국어와 고국을 스스로 박탈함과 동시에 강박적으로 그것으로 회귀하고자 하는 경향을 보여준다. 이러한 미적 감수성과 작품의 이중적 존재와 더불어 그는 자신의 것이자 자신의 것이 아니기도 한 독특하고, 낯선 미지의 목소리를 창출해낸다. 따라서 우리가 그의 작품을 “모던”하고 “트랜스내셔널”하다고 말할 때, 그것은 바로 그러한 특성이 패러독스이자 아포리임을 받아들이는 것을 의미한다. 요컨대 그의 주인공들은 점점 “한갖” 글쓰는 목소리들로 격하되어, 마침 그들이 언어와 의미의 “혼돈” 속에 빠져있을 때에 뿌리상실과 이해불가능성의 첨예한 감각을 표현하는 것이다. 그러한 목소리들

In his self-proclaimed tour de force, As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner reveals death to be a transformative force, one that, in its very opacity, constitutes a source of inconclusive and potentially endless mental play. Self-consciously aware that the human mind will never succeed in bridging the caesura between life and death, his novel nevertheless seeks to exhaust itself in attempting the venture. These confrontations between the human imagination and finitude rearticulate (the thinking of) l

Robert Musil (1880-1942) is widely recognized as a major figure of European modernism, though his most famous work, The Man Without Qualities (1930-1942), continues to be better known than read. In this novel, Musil elaborates his investigative literary method of “essayism,” which strives to bring artistic and scientific thinking into contact with each other. For him, essayism—simultaneously a mode of thinking and a manner of living—provides the most effective means for critiquing and reshaping

For admirers of James Joyce, June 16 is Bloomsday, the single day in 1904 immortalized in his epic novel Ulysses. Well known for its difficulty and elaborate formal experimentation, the novel continues to present formidable challenges for undergraduate students throughout the English-speaking world; in an international liberal arts college in Korea, effectively teaching this high modernist text, with its almost encyclopedic recalibration of the Western tradition, might appear to be nearly imposs

At the conclusion of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the entrance of Macduff, bearing Macbeth’s severed head on a pike, sets off mirthful celebration. Evil, it seems, has been mercilessly punished and all that had been foul in Scotland is now fair. There is, however, something excessive and incongruous about this gruesome thing, the sightless head that was Macbeth’s, juxtaposed against the optimism of the victors. For us, who have watched Macbeth’s precipitous rise and decline, we find scant comfort in t

Pak T’aewŏn’s two most important works from the 1930s, A Day in the Life of Kubo the Novelist and Scenes from Ch’onggye Stream, remain lively artifacts of life and literature in Seoul during this turbulent decade of Korea’s colonial modernity. In disclosing the uneasy coexistence of the traditional and the modern, as well as sharp inequality, the texts represent everyday life in Pak’s beloved city as a complex mixture of suffering and kindness, aspiration and disappointment, monotony and excitem

My contribution to the Underwood International College Symposium on the Global Liberal Arts emphasizes the value of “mere reading” as a pedagogical practice in the literature classroom. Taking inspiration from Paul de Man and Wallace Stevens, I argue that to develop undergraduate students into capable critical thinkers, we, as professors of literature, should assign texts that offer resistance; and furthermore, that we need to make them interpret these difficult texts, by themselves, without tur