올슨과 물리학 그리고 '객체주의'

구태헌 한국영미어문학회 2022 영미어문학 Vol.- No.146

Olson, Physics and 'objectism.' This paper examines how the American poet Charles Olson was influenced by the discoveries of modern physics in his poetry and prose. Einstein's physics demanded a change in our imaginative picture of the world and poets were attracted to such his concepts as the loss of absolute space and time. Olson's seminal essay “Projective Verse” advances methods of understanding poetry which draws from Einstein's special theory of relativity. In addition, this paper discusses the ways Olson drew from quantum mechanics in writing his poetic theories by focusing on "uncertainty principle." In the early modernism represented by Eliot, the subject’s relation to objects is generally considered as one of recognition or domination and is characterized by discontinuity. Olson tries to break down the subject's epistemological tower by saying "a man is himself an object." Olson’s definition of "a poem as object" shifts our attention from the subject’s power to dominate an object to “a series of objects in field” including the self and the poem, and leads a new way of American poetry beyond modernism.

탐정 소설의 기괴하고 숭고한 대상: 포우의 「군중 속의 그 사람」 과 「도둑맞은 편지」를 중심으로

구태헌 한국중앙영어영문학회 2009 영어영문학연구 Vol.51 No.4

According to Poe’s poetic theory, “the contemplation of the beautiful” or “the Human Aspiration for Supernal Beauty” functions as the poetic principle and makes it possible to experience the pleasurable excitement or the poetic sentiment. But Poe’s beauty is differentiated from ‘beauty’ in the classical aesthetics such as Edmund Burke’s or Immanuel Kant’s in that it is defined as not a main source for order and balance but as “a something in the distance,” and related to the unattainable like the death of a beautiful woman. Rather, Poe’s beauty can be said to have a similarity with the role of ‘sublime’ argued in Burke’s or Kant’s aesthetic theory. We come to find a paradoxical structure based on Poe’s definition of beauty as the unattainable repeated in Poe’s detective stories. For example, in “Ligeia” the relation between a husband and a wife represents the typical structure of other detective stories in that the husband’ efforts to fathom something profound in his wife’ face fails in the end and both of two can’t escape their tragic destiny repeating the endless chase like vampires. In “the Man of the Crowd,” this chasing structure deepens more and is presented more variously through the relation between ‘I’ and “the man of the crowd.” Finally, we find that in “The Purloined Letter” which shows how the chase go when the chased object doesn’t allow it to be read, the place of subject is determined by that of the unreadable object and the one replaced endlessly by the other without finding any solution or safety.

‘객관적 상관물,’ ‘대상 a’ 그리고 ‘맥거핀’— 엘리엇, 라깡 그리고 히치콕

구태헌 한국현대영미시학회 2009 현대영미시연구 Vol.15 No.1

Challenging the assumptions which underlie Eliot’s understanding of Hamlet’s emotion as a failure, this paper problematizes the ‘objective correlative’ which has served as a touchstone of poetic Modernism and epitomized a major transformation from the romantic poetics of authorial self-expression to a new modernist poetics based on objectivity and impersonality. Why Eliot termed Hamlet an artistic failure instead of inheriting the tradition of the Romantic Hamlet from Schlegel to Freud can be newly discussed by locating and re-examining the ‘objective correlative’ in comparison with Hitchcock’s ‘MacGuffin’ and Lacan’s ‘object a.’ As is well known, ‘MacGuffin’ is the empty pretext which just serves to set a story in motion, but has no value in itself. If the alienation of subject into the symbolic order means to set a story of him or her in motion, ‘MacGuffin’ can be said to play a similar role with Lacan’s ‘object a’ which “takes the place of what the subject is symbolically deprived of” in that both of two indicate the lack of the Real and set in motion the symbolic movement at the same time. While claiming that Hamlet’s emotion is in excess of facts and lacking an objective correlative, Eliot tries to deny that there exists a void in the symbolic order or signification which “is inexpressible,” called ‘MacGuffin’ by Hitchcock or ‘object a’ by Lacan and escape from ‘the real’ of Hamlet or the world to secure a corner in the room and continue his fictive dominance over women or the world like ‘Prufrock.’ This can be why Eliot failed to see Hamlet as “the drama of an individual subjectivity.” Challenging the assumptions which underlie Eliot’s understanding of Hamlet’s emotion as a failure, this paper problematizes the ‘objective correlative’ which has served as a touchstone of poetic Modernism and epitomized a major transformation from the romantic poetics of authorial self-expression to a new modernist poetics based on objectivity and impersonality. Why Eliot termed Hamlet an artistic failure instead of inheriting the tradition of the Romantic Hamlet from Schlegel to Freud can be newly discussed by locating and re-examining the ‘objective correlative’ in comparison with Hitchcock’s ‘MacGuffin’ and Lacan’s ‘object a.’ As is well known, ‘MacGuffin’ is the empty pretext which just serves to set a story in motion, but has no value in itself. If the alienation of subject into the symbolic order means to set a story of him or her in motion, ‘MacGuffin’ can be said to play a similar role with Lacan’s ‘object a’ which “takes the place of what the subject is symbolically deprived of” in that both of two indicate the lack of the Real and set in motion the symbolic movement at the same time. While claiming that Hamlet’s emotion is in excess of facts and lacking an objective correlative, Eliot tries to deny that there exists a void in the symbolic order or signification which “is inexpressible,” called ‘MacGuffin’ by Hitchcock or ‘object a’ by Lacan and escape from ‘the real’ of Hamlet or the world to secure a corner in the room and continue his fictive dominance over women or the world like ‘Prufrock.’ This can be why Eliot failed to see Hamlet as “the drama of an individual subjectivity.”

‘숭고에서 정신분열로: 스티븐스와 에쉬베리

구태헌 한국현대영미시학회 2006 현대영미시연구 Vol.12 No.1

Taehun KuThis study examines the meaning of “decreation” in Wallace Stevens' and John Ashbery's poems with the help of some classical arguments on ‘the sublime’ and ‘schizophrenia.’ If it is not possible any longer to restore such a breakdown caused by the encounter with the unnamable in the name of God or ‘ideas,’ how can such a epistemological crisis be overcome in modern times ‘the uncanny’ strides instead of ‘the sublime’? This question is what we will examine in this paper focusing on Stevens' and Ashbery's poems.Walllace Stevens' “desire without an object of desire” can be said to indicate well the moment we encounter the unnamable and fail to represent it. Instead of refilling the epistemological gap with such transcendental terms as God or ‘Ideas,’ Stevens presents a peculiar way to overcome this crisis, which is called “abstraction” or “decreation” by the poet himself. Like “nothing” in “The Snow Man” or “empty” in “American Sublime,” Stevens presents “the nothing that is” as the moment we can have a sublime encounter with something like “the sun” to reestablish new order in this waste land.John Ashbery's “decreation” is differentiated from Stevens' one in that he presents “emptiness” or “nothing” as not a sublime and central signifier such as Kant's “ideas” or Stevens' “nothing,” but a theater various emotions can pass freely. That is, Ashbery's “emptiness” indicates an empty space to make it possible that “irrational” and formless emotions, which originally resist being named, repeat appearing and disappearing, or “being emoted on.” In this empty space, self come to have a presentiment of the noises the bus will make over streets instead of seeing "the nothing that is.” Soon, our mind or “desiring-machine” will clatter along these schizophrenic streets and “the empty space” be filled with violent emotions, which moment is often called “rapture” by Ashbery.

부정성의 시학―포우와 스티븐스

구태헌 한국현대영미시학회 2013 현대영미시연구 Vol.19 No.1

This essay is an attempt to read Edgar Allan Poe’s and Wallace Stevens’ poetry and poetical theory from the perspective of negativity, which has been mentioned as one of the key concepts in modern aesthetics since Kant’s “negative sublime.” It is interesting that Harold Bloom underrates Poe’s poetry and poetical theory saying that no reader who cares deeply for the best poetry written in English can care greatly for Poe’s verse, while Theodor W. Adorno presents Poe as one of the harbingers of modernism in that both of them agree to place importance on negativity respectively as the main principle of modern art and ‘American Negativity.’ Especially Poe’s “Nevermore,” the repeated refrain of “The Raven” can be said to express a peculiar moment of “American Negativity” as Emerson’s or Stevens’ “Nothing” does in that it functions as some pivot on which the whole structure of a poem turns and contributes to producing new meanings and thoughts, even if it itself has no definite meaning. How various arguments on negativity or negative presentation can help us understand Poe’s and Stevens’ poetry and poetical theory newly and how a new genealogy of American poetry from Poe to Stevens can be possible will be examined.

“알고 있는 자”에서 “함께 살아가기”로: 엘리엇과 애쉬베리

구태헌 한국T.S.엘리엇학회 2015 T.S. 엘리엇 연구 Vol.25 No.2

본 논문에서는 엘리엇과 애쉬베리의 시와 시론들을 통해 모더니즘과 모더니즘 이후의 시학의 차이를 여러 관점에서 바라보고 그런 차이들의 의미가 무엇인지 살펴보았다. 우선 '체계'를 향한 모더니즘의 요구가 위에서 또는 멀리서 바라보는 시선의 위계적 구도 속에서 진행되고 있음에 우선 주목하였다. 어떤 고전적인 서사도 가능하지 않는 프루프록의 진퇴양난 속에서 이런 위계적 시선의 구도가 결국 무너질 수 밖에 없음이 발견되었다. 애쉬베리의 시는 “어떻게 시작해야 하는가?”라고 묻는 프루프록의 물음에 대한 하나의 대답으로 이해될 수 있었다. 애쉬베리는 “공허” 앞으로 여러 감정들이 마술경처럼 지나가는 묘사를 통해 "부재의 기호“를 중심으로 기호들이 떠도는 탈구조주의적 풍경을 우선 그려내고 있다. 위에서 바라보거나 의미를 읽어내려 하지말고 “인생의 긴 시간 사람들과 같이 살아온” 것처럼 느끼며 시작하라고 애쉬베리는 말한다. 애쉬베리의 시를 통해 우리는 감정들이 계속 이어져가고 “밀려오고 밀려가는 움직임” 속에서 하루하루가 완성되는 새로운 숭고의 순간을 발견할 수 있었다.

두부외상 후 발생한 지주막하 출혈에 대한 임상분석

구태헌,김한식,목진호,이규춘,박용석,이영배,Goo, Tae Heon,Kim, Han Sik,Mok, Jin Ho,Lee, Kyu Chun,Park, Yong Seok,Lee, Young Bae 대한신경외과학회 2000 Journal of Korean neurosurgical society Vol.29 No.1

Objective : Many authors suggest that patients with traumatic subarachnoid hemorrhage(tSAH) visible on first CT after heve injury had a significantly worse prognosis than patients who do not. The aim of this study is to identify patients with tSAH who present with a bad prognosis by reviewing their clinicoradiological features and plan appropriate treatments. Patients and Methods : We reviewed and analysed the factors that influenced discharge outcomes in 172 patients with tSAH for a 3-year period. The outcome was divided into good(good recovery and moderate disability of glasgow outcome scale) and good(severe disability, vegetative state and death). Results : A regression analysis of statistical significant factors(p<0.05) among the clinical and CT features ranked them by descending order of contribution to Glasgow Outcome Scale(GOS) scores at the time of discharge from acute hospitalization as follows 1) clinical : admission Glasgow Coma Scale(GCS), hypotension, CT grade, abnormal APTT, skull fracture, hyperglycemia(>160mg/dl), hypoxia, operation, 2) CT : basal cistern effacement(BCE), mass lesion, cortical sulcal effacement(CSE), midline shift. Conclusion : We have also experienced that the CT grading scale proposed by Green et al is a simple and useful prognostic factor. The authors believe that the patients with high CT grade need adjuvant therapies as of well surgery but it seems mandatory to consider early identification and correction of hypotension, hyperglycemia, and hypoxia in emergency setting.

추상성, 상상력 그리고 무의미 : 콜리지, 스티븐스 그리고 들뢰즈

구태헌 한국영미어문학회 2012 영미어문학 Vol.- No.104

This study starts with L. B. Leggett’s argument that Stevens has a great debt to Ⅰ. A. Richards’s Coleridge on Imagination concerning the word abstraction. According to Leggett, Stevens found this book very pertinent to shaping the notion of abstraction in that Richards attempted to reconcile two romantic conceptions of the imagination. Firstly, Richards’s argument that the imagination-reality dilemma as the central problem of philosophy results from “systematic linguistic illusion” leads to Stevens’s argument that the world is no longer an extraneous object but an image. That is, to acknowledge that the world external to the mind has no meaning in itself and that any formulation of it in language is a fiction or an image means that an abstraction process would be of necessity. Also Deleuze’s recent argument on “the logic of sense” helps us get a fuller understanding of Stevens’s abstraction. Especially, Deleuze’s ‘nonsense’ can be said to have similar function with Coleridge’s or Stevens’s idea in that its existence or circulation enacts the donation of sense and contributes to new sense being produced, although it itself has no meaning.

‘봄’ 그리고 ‘무’

구태헌 영미문학연구회 2007 안과 밖 Vol.0 No.22

This essay is an attempt to read Robert Frost’s and William Carlos Williams’ poetry from the perspective of the negative presentation and establish a new genealogy of poetic modernism. “Negativity” or “negative presentation” has been mentioned as one of the key concepts in modern aesthetics since Kant’s “negative sublime.” The only way to present the unpresentable, instead of calling it in the name of God or ‘ideas,’ will be to accept that there is something beyond the human act of represention. However, when the human representational act or symbolic system fails, the Thing, or invisibilities, comes to emerge sublimely. Emerson’s “The mind goes antagonizing on” in “Experience,” which presents a negative movement not as a step toward the dialogical affirmation but as positive in itself, can be said to represent this genealogy of the poetics of negativity. According to Emerson, the flow called life consists of resistances that help accelerate the forward motion, and we can find this Emersonian linkage of life and literary creativity in Frost’s and Williams’ poems. First of all, Frost’s “West­Running Brook” deserves to be called a direct expression of Emersonian negativity, which claims that the absolute or Utopia be identified not with the First Cause or an immovable thing but the antagonistic action itself that “runs away to fill the abyss’s void with emptiness.” Also, Williams’ greatest early achievement, “Spring and All,” presents a vividly imaged space of negativity where “everything and nothing are synonymous.” Williams’ spring, which is approaching yet not here after the annihilation of every human­willed invention and imposition, is identified with “the depth of our despair” and “Hope long asleep” at the same time. That is, spring is approaching antagonizing all previously established identities that try to fix and resolve “absolute negativity,” which is Utopia.

‘노동’과 ‘마법’의 상호작용에 대한 로버트 프로스트의 관점

구태헌 한국중앙영어영문학회 2007 영어영문학연구 Vol.49 No.3

Robert Frost’s labor poems open a mysterious space where ‘spell’ or fantasy cannot be separable from labor or reality and rather holds a cooperative relationship with it as a way to overcome the modern dilemmatic situation often called ‘the waste land.’ Frost’s method for accomplishing human dream again in this waste land is differentiated from T. S. Eliot’s ‘the mythical method’ to impose “shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy” from outside. Frost’s famous line, “The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows” can be said to represent the significance of new perceptional/experiential possibilities found in his labor poems. That is, only manual labor, which makes “our fingers rough,” is not sufficient to have some knowledge of or reach “the fact.” As Žižek says “through fantasy, we learn ‘how to desire,’” such mysterious acts of dreaming something as spell or fantasy are indispensable to complete human labor. The reason labor needs or should know spell or fantasy is that there is something in nature too elusive to touch or name. Therefore human labor needs to admit its limitation and leave a space for dreaming something inexplicable, because anything human do to the facts falsifies them. In other words, art or human labor should be not transforming the fact but “happening of the truth,” and man should form things not with one’s own will or interests but “in accordance with the laws of beauty.”