돈 드릴로의 『화이트 노이즈』에 제시된 포스트모던 경험의 속성

나희경 ( Hee Kyung Nah ) 21세기영어영문학회 2014 영어영문학21 Vol.27 No.4

In White Noise, Don DeLillo carefully investigates the causal interrelationship between technology and the obsessive fear of death in postmodern society. The two social and psychological elements of postmodernity are closely interconnected with each other in their function. Technology becomes the process and result of intellectual human activities through which he performs cultural transformation of nature for his successful adaptation to it. The fear of death, a fundamental psychological condition of human beings, gets distorted and amplified by the influence of modern technology. This paper examines the socio-psychological features of postmodern experience suggested in White Noise by focusing on the difference of the natural and cultural qualities of experience of its main characters. In the life of Jack Gladney’s family, the main characters of the novel, symbolic or cultural experience overpowers physical or natural experience. Their life is in the condition of the surfeit of the one and the lack of the other. Some of the characters such as Jack and Orest show an extraordinary concern toward the value of purely physical function of their bodies. Yet most of them are unaware of the fact that their life is excessively dependent upon the power of technology and the function of symbolic experience. DeLillo maintains a satirical viewpoint to the overwhelming influence of modern technology on the life of those characters, which in turn causes the excess of symbolic experience and the uncontrollable fear of death for them. However, DeLillo does not suggest that we can disregard the value of symbolic experience which is rooted in the ontological condition of human species.

The Emotional Process of Henry Fleming in The Red Badge of Courage

나희경 ( Hee Kyung Nah ) 21세기영어영문학회 1994 영어영문학21 Vol.9 No.-

농업주의 이상에 비추어 본 햄린 갈랜드의 『주통행로』 -농촌 경관의 이중성

나희경 ( Hee Kyung Nah ) 21세기영어영문학회 2012 영어영문학21 Vol.25 No.2

This paper argues that the rural landscape, the values of agriculture, and the nature of farmers which Hamlin Garland describes in his Main-Travelled Roads sharply contradict what Thomas Jefferson suggested in his agrarianism. In Garland`s short stories, the visitors of the country tend to see the farming villages as a place incorporated with the beauty of nature, the pleasure of farm work, and the simple life of farmers. By contrast, the actual farmers are disposed to perceive their own place as that of poverty, painful labor, and enslavement. As a result, the two contradictory landscapes are painted in Main-Travelled Roads: one, peaceful pastoral scenes seen through the eyes of sentimental visitors, and the other, scenes of dejected farm life viewed by the farmers themselves. The discrepancy between the actual life of Western farmers described in Main- travelled Roads and the pastoral vision suggested by Jefferson in his agrarianism derives from the incompatibility of the two writers` views of both human desire and pastoral virtues. The Western farmers in Garland`s stories no longer live a simple but satisfactory life in harmony with nature. Those farmers basically have the same kind of social and material desire as city-dwellers have. The prairie farming villages are not an environment for pastoral poets to praise, but it is a place in which farmers struggle to make a living through drudgery against land. In Garland`s stories, most of the farmers wish to escape from the country and the severe agricultural labor. Despite their desire for cultural life and material affluence, however, they feel frustrated by the limitations of their harsh reality.

심리적 중간경관으로서 미국의 교외 -존 치버의 교외 소설

나희경 ( Hee Kyung Nah ) 21세기영어영문학회 2010 영어영문학21 Vol.23 No.1

John Cheever`s Shady Hill short stories explore the psychological paradoxes of American middle-class suburbanites epitomized by their indefinable inner pain ironically exuding from their perfect safety and happiness. This paper first discusses the equivocal narrative voice which Cheever has adopted to express the aesthetic and moral discontinuity between the facade, the back, and the inside of the life in the American suburbia, a so-called bourgeois Utopia. Such an equivocal narrative voice enables him to effectively express his sympathetic satire on the American suburbs. Then I try to describe the psychological middle-landscape of the suburban dwellers by focusing on their premature self-compromise and feeble selfhood which in turn cause their paradoxical pursuit of happiness. The suburbanites` strong desire for the ease of life motivates them to move into the suburb. Ironically, however, their psychological misery is chiefly engendered by their excessive concern for their own safety and happiness. Such a self-centered pursuit of wellbeing depending on their other-directed conformity of attitude reflects their feeble self which lacks some internalized principles for their acts. The American middle-class, mostly composed of self-made men, have chosen the suburb for their dwelling environment, a middle ground between a metropolis and rural area. They intend, on the one hand, to escape from the struggles and troubles of urban life and, on the other, to secure the harmony and relief of life under the influence of nature by deciding to live in the suburb. Never completely removing their life from the material wealth of a big city nearby, they seem to secure a perfect golden medium for their dwelling environment between nature and culture. In that sense, the suburb as a geographical middle landscape incarnates an ideal space for dwelling. In terms of their social status, the middle-class occupy a middle ground between the lower working-class below and the higher upper-class above. Reflecting such a socio-economical position of them, they indeed tend to show an eclectic attitude of life between the stimulation and the repose in it. Such an eclecticism of them, however, entails some serious emotional problems in the psychological middle landscape of the middle-class suburbanites. Hence their serious self-contradictions and terrible feeling of anxiety and hollowness.

헨리 제임스의 소설에서 직업의 의미: 예술과 돈에 대한 이중 우려

나희경 ( Hee Kyung Nah ) 근대영미소설학회 2001 근대 영미소설 Vol.8 No.2

Henry James was one of the first writers who practiced authorship as a profession. Throughout his career as a professional writer, he received ongoing recognition from editors in both England and America for his literary achievements. He is also believed to have secured financial stability thanks to an enormous inheritance from his rich father. Despite this seeming stability in his social and financial status, however, James, who decided to live by his pen, was haunted by a tenacious pressure from `the money question` engendered by his precarious literary income. At the same time, he was anxious not to sacrifice the aesthetic standards of his literary practice to satisfy the demands of the marketplace. He was struggling to keep an interior balance between those two incompatible desire.s In this sense, his literary career was like walking a tightrope. This double anxiety over art and money which James had to cope with has much to do with the concept of professionalism emerging in the mid-nineteenth century. Professionals such as doctors, lawyers, teachers, bankers, and literary writers attempted to make a kind of self-authentication through their professional knowledge and practice. Because they claimed spiritual values like aesthetic creation or public service in their vocational activities, they tended to suppress or disguise their desire for the material values represented by money. We can find an ample trace of the inner discord between the alleged and the suppressed pursuit of such professionals reflected not only in James`s biography but also in his fictional works, such as Washington Square, The Bostonians, The Princess Casamassima, and "The Next Time".

『월든』에 나타난 소로우의 문명관 : 더 현명한 미개인

나희경 ( Hee Kyung Nah ) 韓國아메리카學會 2008 美國學論集 Vol.40 No.2

인간의 군집 본성과 도시 욕망-드라이저의 『시스터 캐리』

나희경 ( Hee Kyung Nah ) 21세기영어영문학회 2011 영어영문학21 Vol.24 No.1

In Sister Carrie, Dreiser dramatizes the contrasting changes of urban desire respectively practised by Carrie Meeber and George Hustwood. Carrie`s desire is continuously expended and intensified in the urban environments of Chicago and New York, while Hurstwood`s desire gradually declines and finally fades away. The change of desire determines the rise and fall of the fates of the two characters in the urban society. This paper explores the process of limitless expansion and transformation of Carrie`s urban desire on the assumption that it is an economic and social aspiration stimulated by the so-called "conspicuous consumption" and "pecuniary emulation" which characterize the consumer capitalist culture of the late 19th-century America. Dreiser asserts that man has come to secure existential dignity by pursuing his urban desire, that is, by constructing the city. In Sister Carrie, the fates of both Carrie and Hurstwood are formed by the dynamic interaction of the collective nature and urban desire of human beings, both of which are densely enacted in the city. Carrie`s physical need grows and turns into psychological and social desire. By contrast, Hurstwood`s social desire gradually diminishes and finally turns into physical need. Whether they satisfy their desire or not, both Carrie and Hurstwood remain mentally frustrated in the end. Dreiser suggests that an individual`s urban desire in its nature does not conduce to his or her inner fulfillment. Hence the ultimate spiritual emptiness of Carrie at the end of the novel despite her material and social success. Ironically, the more satisfied she becomes in her execution of desire, the more confused she becomes about the meaning of life, because her urban desire permanently multiplies itself devoid of its ultimate moral ideal.

자기 은폐를 통한 자기 확인 : 이창래의 『원어민』과 수키 김의 『통역자』를 중심으로

나희경 ( Hee Kyung Nah ) 한국현대영미소설학회 2006 현대영미소설 Vol.13 No.2

자연과 농업에 대한 과도한 개념화의 파괴성: 프랭크 노리스의 『문어』 읽기

나희경 ( Hee Kyung Nah ) 한국현대영미소설학회 2013 현대영미소설 Vol.20 No.3

This paper explores how Frank Norris in The Octopus deals with the distorted economic or moral attitude of the Western farmers and railroaders toward land and the crops it produced. The Pacific & Southwestern Railroad and the farmers` League both are obsessed with the price of land and the profits from wheat, hardly recognizing the essential, material values of those two elements of nature. Such a tenacious attraction to the capitalistic value of land and crops is necessarily accompanied by a process of lopsided, reckless conceptualization of nature. Such conceptualization of matter turns out to function as a destructive force for the life of the Westerners. Land is the fundamental life-giving basis for all living things, and wheat is a staple food for human beings. Those two elements of nature serve as sustenance for human beings only in terms of their material values. But the two groups of the Western pioneers fiercely pursue conceptualized capitalistic values from nature and agriculture, such as property and profit, while totally ignoring the material values of them. The P. & S. W. Railroad, a symbolic combination of contemporary capitalism and technology, treats the land grants which they received from the federal government solely as an object of speculation. Likewise, the ranchers in San Joaquin Valley, who run agribusinesses through employing a number of farmhands and by taking advantage of the latest farming machinery, are apt to conceptualize the ownership and monetary value of their ranches. Norris makes most of the main characters who have fought for the property, farmers or railroad agents, perish in the end of the novel. Yet wheat, a symbol of nature, prospers, and the railroad, a combination of capitalistic and technological systems, goes on. Thus he calls our attention to the destructiveness of psychological human desire which tends to excessively conceptualize nature in its materialistic pursuit.

문화적 혼동에 대한 풍자로서의 헨리 제임스의 『보스턴 사람들』

나희경 ( Hee Kyung Nah ) 근대 영미소설 학회 2010 근대 영미소설 Vol.17 No.3

Henry James had a strong interest in the Naturalistic novel while he was writing The Bostonians. This had a considerable influence on the way in which he dealt with the controversial theme of the novel, that is, the collision of a radical feminism and a st