Certainty in Uncertainty: Robert Frost and Quantum Duality

류기택 한국영미어문학회 2015 영미어문학 Vol.- No.116

Gi Taek Ryoo. 2015. Certainty in Uncertainty: Robert Frost and Quantum Duality. Studies in British and American Language and Literature 116, 57-82. Frost’s poetry presents a reality much like the one that was being explored by quantum physics. One can find, in his poems, many references and allusions to the exciting and provocative concepts such as Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and Bohr’s principle of complementarity. Many critics indeed have explored the ways in which Frost’s poetry depicts an inevitable uncertainty and limitation of human subjectivity. Acknowledging the coexistence of irreconcilable opposites in nature necessarily evokes ‘uncertainty’ in mind. Frost’s uncertainty, however, illuminates the essentially indecisive and probabilistic nature of our life rather than human limitation or inevitable humanistic manipulation or interpretation of reality. This particular aspects of Nature’s―rather than human’s―uncertainty are deeply imbedded in Frost’s philosophy of dualism. This paper proposes to offer a more balanced account of Frost’s uncertainty, moving beyond the previous critics’ somewhat limited epistemological analysis, by applying a more comprehensive framework of quantum theories, to a larger span of Frost’s poetry and poetics. Frost’s poetry can be better understood by looking at his poetics of uncertainty not just from an epistemological perspective but from an ontological perspective as well.

A Drama of Human Psychology: Hawthorne's "My Kinsman, Major Molineux"

류기택 한국현대영어영문학회 2006 현대영어영문학 Vol.50 No.4

Hawthorne’s “My Kinsman, Major Molinewx” can be read as a drama of human psychology as it deals with a young man’s psychological or moral dilemma involved in the act of expelling his father as a way of achieving independence. Consequently, the protagonist Robin is destined to suffer from the ambivalent, mixed feeling of hate and guilt toward his father. Such Robin’s dilemma is, in fact, what American intellectuals like Hawthorne must have felt at the time of American revolution as the young America at that time had to expel its father country that it had more or less internalized. Thus the young American Robin tries to find more acceptable ways of confronting his father and of rationalizing his cruel actions against him. In fact, all the figures and events in the story are carefully constructed according to Robin’s psychic interests to deal with his current dilemma. In this paper, I will examine the ways in which the young America, represented by Robin, comes to utilize various psychological defense mechanisms to deal with its current dilemma and to find a logical justification for the revolution against Britain, which would otherwise overwhelm it at this stage of its barely beginning ability to integrate the contradictory feeling toward its father country.

The Field of Energy: Robert Creeley's Poetics of Absence

류기택 한국영미어문학회 2010 영미어문학 Vol.- No.97

Robert Creeley has been absent since his death in 2005 but survived at the same time by his distinctive poetics of absence characterized by the moments of hesitations and syncopations. One must arrive, while reading Creeley's poems, at an enormous sense of void or absence generated by the words and lines that are abruptly cut off or unwillingly held together. His language is continually hesitating, being interrupted, and breaking off without a sense of direction provided by conventional grammar. Not only does Creeley reveal many places of absence in his poems but many of his poems indeed survey the underlying conditions that create the voids, which is one of the distinctive characteristics of his poetry. This paper examines Creeley's poetics of absence, demonstrating that the absence is a moment of struggle for Creeley to reject the language of any rational ego and encounter language as a thing in itself. This is possible only when he participates himself in the process of creation as another object which has its own biological rhythm. His words are juxtaposed as things themselves while it is the pulse beat, the breath of the poet that give a particular shape to the language. This is a place where the natural energies of the poet and language collide or coalesce in an instant of time to create an utterance, where the original encounter with the firstness of body and language can evoke the most adequate expression. When the two objects or things collide with high energies, as observed in modern physics, the energy of the two colliding objects is redistributed to form a new object. Much like the field of energy in modern physics, where energy turns to matter, matter to energy, Creeley's absence or gaps are full of potentials or possibilities of words. This place of absence allows Creeley to achieve a true reconciliation between the body and language, a certain kind of unity between subject and object, achieved, however, with great difficulty.

The Ecopoetics of Jorie Graham: Lyric Engagement with the Material World

류기택 한국영어영문학회 2022 영어 영문학 Vol.68 No.2

The poetry of Jorie Graham explores the boundaries between the human subject and the material world by employing experimental language and lyric subjectivity to re-think our relationship with the material world. Graham has been unduly criticized both by postmodern quarters for her persistent use of lyric subjectivity as a privileging center of perception and by ecocriticism sectors for the linguistic experimentation of her poetry that overlooks the material world. However, for Graham, language and subjectivity are not isolatable from each other; moreover, they acquire their existence by taking on materiality. Her lyric subjectivity is firmly rooted within the material world, which never exists outside of us but emerges with us as a phenomenon. In this sense, her poetry enacts what Karen Barad would call “material-discursive practices,” in which the human subject, language, and matter are mutually entailed through their “intra-action” with each other. Subjectivity emerges, in Graham’s poetry, as fully engaged with the material world, acquiring its own material existence, since materiality and discourse, together with the subject, are co-constitutive of the emerging world. With insights drawn from Barad, this paper examines one of Graham’s masterworks Materialism (1993) to investigate how her experimental forms embody the process of intra-action between the human and the nonhuman, and the material and the discursive, while awakening our sense of interconnectedness with the material world we find ourselves in. The experimental form of Graham’s lyric poetry allows us to (re)engage with material-discursive practices, which may bring more environmentally sustainable configuration of the world.

Technology and Literary Imagination:Williams and Ashbery

류기택 한국영미어문학회 2008 영미어문학 Vol.- No.86

America has been associated with technological advances of the 20th century such as telephone, Ford, IBM, and Silicon Valley, and such invention of technology has affected the way people live and think. This paper will examine how William Carlos Williams and John Ashbery have tried to incorporate what they see as distinctive American culture and sensibility shaped and changed by the 20th century technology and technological products to their writings in order to make their writings vitally consonant with their own ages. Williams's writing represents the aesthetic and functional dimensions of Modern 'machine technology' like automobiles while Ashbery's writing reflects Postmodern American culture shaped by 'information technology' like Internet. The poets present distinctive literary styles that are appealing to the appearance of and the qualities of machine and information technology and technological products. Such observations will make me conclude that there has been a parallel development between literary imagination and technology throughout the 20th century.

Wallace Stevens: Chaos, Complexity, and System of Self-reference

류기택 한국영어영문학회 2013 영어 영문학 Vol.59 No.6

This paper examines Wallace Stevens’s self-referential repetition, ametaphor-making mechanism, through the ideas of chaos and systems inorder to show how his writing shares common cultural concerns of thechanging scientific paradigms in the 20th century. I will demonstratehow his poetry acts as a self-organizing system, growing through thechaotic feedback loops of self-reflective metaphors towards higherorders of autopoietic organization. Steven’s poetry reveals an infinitelybifurcated self-similar structure, an instance of fractality, in which eachpart of the structure resembles each other and the whole. This fractalgeometry is created by predictable periodicity of certain patterns intermingledwith unpredictable variation. The constant movement of repetitionis precisely what generates the creative natural force, which, in turn,provides the energy of the textual system to consistently self-organizeand produce itself anew. Stevens’ idea of making it anew through “decreation”is particularly analogous to Prigogine’s “dissipative structure,”which maintains itself far from equilibrium through a series of bifurcations,and which also describes the autopoetic structure of a living system. Stevens’ poetry organizes itself by means of an interlocking series ofself-referential metaphors that generate contextual dependencies betweensimilarities and differences of its terms. This may be what Maturana callsan “autopoiesis,” which is organized as a network of process of productionof components that produces the components. Stevens’s poetry communicatesnot through propositional content of its utterances, but by thestructure of the self-referential system. The idea of ‘autopiesis’ provideshelpful language to illuminate Stevens’ textual dynamics, which enablesus look deeper into Stevens’ rhetorical strategies and thematic concerns.

Ashbery’s Aesthetics of Difficulty: Information Theory and Hypertext

류기택 한국영어영문학회 2012 영어 영문학 Vol.58 No.6

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.

Systems View and the Relational Poetics of Muriel Rukeyser

류기택 한국현대영미시학회 2020 현대영미시연구 Vol.26 No.2

Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980) conceives a poem as a web of relationships, in which all the elements of the poem are to be understood, not in isolation from one another, but rather as part of a rhythmic pattern that weave them all together as a whole. Rukeyser has found poetic expression to describe nature that the science of her day in 1930s was seeking to explore and explain. Her notion of poetry as “a system” betrays similar concerns and assumptions of General Systems Theory, proposed by Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901-1972), which emphasizes the essential interrelatedness and interconnectedness of all phenomena, be they physical, biological, and social. This paper examines some of Rukeyser’s poems and her relational poetics, to explore how her view of poetry as a system reflects the General Systems Theory, focusing on her poetic understanding of science and the scientific implications of her relational poetics. The paper will also make an investigation into the way Rukeyser, while greatly influenced by the nineteenth century scientist Willard Gibbs, has translated him rather creatively to fit into her relational poetics, in a way which is deeply resonant with the systems theory.

T. S. Eliot and the Arrow of Time

류기택 한국T.S.엘리엇학회 2017 T.S. 엘리엇 연구 Vol.27 No.1

T. S. Eliot’s poetry allows us to reexamine our understanding of the relation between art and science. Eliot has discovered a poetic evocation of the tension between entropic dissipation and self-organization that haunts the second law thermodynamics and non-linear thermodynamics, the later development of the second law. This paper examines Eliot’s unsettling journey of (re)discovering time or time’s arrow, with metaphors drawn from the theories of thermodynamics. While, in The Waste Land, Eliot discovers time that is irreversibly heading toward the tragic end of the thermal equilibrium predicated by the second law, he is able to rediscover time in Four Quartets, time which rather evolves in an ever-ascending spiral intimated in non-linear thermodynamics. This is the ‘spiral’ arrow of time, I will argue, with which Eliot comes to reclaim the past, the tradition, ultimately redeeming time itself. Eliot moves beyond the dualistic, antithetic concept of time versus eternity - time to be redeemed by eternity - to present rather a spiral pattern of eternal return, which unites time and timelessness, and stillness and movement.

System and Deconstruction of Meaning: John Ashbery

류기택 한국영미어문학회 2004 영미어문학 Vol.- No.73

John Ashbery has presented an interesting style that radically disrupts the traditional system of linguistic representation and promise of interpretive meaning. He has been extremely suspicious, even contemptuous, of "meaning" because meaning is nothing but a shared discourse within us, which has founded the system of representation or interpretation that we use today. Ashbery therefore has diverged from the predictable roles of language into which we are cast, putting against it odd particularities of the chaos, the disorder that cannot be signified or codified into the system of order. Strategically, he overtly eliminates climatic moments such as illuminations, dramatic turning points, or other peaks of intensity, all of which he associates with the unquenchable desire for structural unity and meaning. Accordingly, his poems often block all our attempts to rationalize his disruptive words and images, to make them conform to a coherent interpretative system. For this reason, Ashbery's poetry can be criticized as a failure to communicate with the reader, but what he has been up to is to find another way of communicating beyond the limits of language.