『월든』에 나타난 소로우의 문명관: 더 현명한 미개인

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

Acclaiming Thoreau`s ecological view of nature reflected in his Walden, ecocriticism pours biting denunciation on any sign of anthropocentric thoughts in it. Eco-critical scholars also cast a severely pessimistic glance at the values of civilization and technology on which Thoreau speculates in Walden. This unilateral attack on the self-centered perspective of man and his intellectual achievement does not properly evaluate the multifaceted, complicated, and sometimes even self-contradictory thoughts on the relationship between man and nature which Thoreau elaborates in Walden. This paper interprets Thoreau`s view of civilization, and of nature, its progenitor, with a view to authenticating his belief that the two environmental axises for human survival can, and must, coexist with each other. In Thoreau`s idea, ecocentrism and anthropocentrism are not necessarily in internecine relationship with each other. The one works on the basis of axiological postulation, while the other on the level of epistemological explication. In Walden, Thoreau painstakingly accounts for the unique ontological condition of human beings in natural environment, that is, the fact that human species, unlike all the other species, cannot but adapt nature so as to survive and prosper. Generating civilization is considered not as an option but as a fate for human beings. Thoreau intentionally tried to retreat his experimental life in the forest of Concord back to the state of the diverging point at which civilization had emerged from wild nature. Through practicing life of rigorous simplicity, he surely tried to understand empirically the fundamental relationship between man and nature and to learn how civilization can consist with wild nature. He tried to define the practical boundary and degree of the gross necessaries of life through his half-civilized life. Thoreau points out the fact that human nature got degraded from the healthy simplicity of primitive wildness to the sick slavery of materialistic desire in modern civilization. Moreover, he demands that we recuperate the health of our human nature by maximizing the accommodation of wild nature in our life, that is, by adapting it to the minimum degree. Finally, he envisions a harmonious symbiosis of civilization and nature which is to be fulfilled by fully cultivating the spirituality of our human nature.

헨리 제임스의 소설에서 직업의 의미: 예술과 돈에 대한 이중 우려

나희경 ( Hee Kyung Nah ) 한국근대영미소설학회 2001 근대영미소설 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.

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.

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

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

미국문학에서 기계의 지위 : 지니로부터 연인으로

나희경(Hee Kyung Nah) 한국현대영미소설학회 2001 현대영미소설 Vol.8 No.1

Human species seems to find a congeniality, that is, an emotional comfort working on a genetic level, from other organic species because it shares much biological experience with all the other living things of nature. The traditional view of the relationship between man and nature emphasizes man`s harmonious symbiosis with all the other organic creatures. Meanwhile, another unique existential condition of man seems to make it inevitable for him to transform his natural environment for survival and prosperity, which necessitated his continuous invention of machines. The Industrial Revolution accelerated the development of technology and the consequent invention of machines to improve the condition of human life. With the advent of various new machines, people found themselves in a new, rather mechanistic than natural, environment, which in return required them to revise their traditional sense of reality concerning their relationship with machine as well as with nature. This essay discusses the changeable view of the status of machine reflected in some American literary works since the 19th century. Showing a complex emotional reaction to the changing influence of machine, the American writers have imparted an ever-rising status to machine according to its consistently increasing role in their daily life. Such 19th-century writers as Thoreau and Norris perceived the new machine represented by a train as a kind of genie because they were wondered by the supernatural power which the train exercised to serve man. But they were also worried about the destructive force of the machine in case it would be misused. In the 20th century, people come to have intimacy with machine which now serves them on a private realm. Accordingly, the contemporary writers, unlike their predecessors who were dazzled by the physical force of machine, the contemporary writers are primarily concerned with the psychological impact which machine has on people. Fitzgerald and Ellison regard machine as a faithful but dangerous agent which may lead people into a serious moral confusion. Pynchon satirizes the psychological distortion of modem men who are placed in a completely mechanistic environment. Machine has now become a sweetheart or even a would-be master for some of Pynchon`s characters. All those American writers remind us that both the nostalgia for a pastoral Utopia and the hope of a mechanistic Utopia are destructive as well as ungrounded illusions.

헨리 제임스와 자연주의적 글쓰기 : 실재 , 관찰 , 묘사

나희경(Hee Kyung Nah) 한국현대영미소설학회 1998 현대영미소설 Vol.5 No.2

Henry James had a great interest in French Naturalism for more than two decades. In his ambivalent attitude toward naturalistic writing, James, on the one hand, found a clue to the future of novel from the experimental spirit of the Naturalist writers who emphasized the form and style of novel. On the other hand, he rejected their restricted vision of individual and society. This paper studies James`s critical response to the theory and execution of the French Naturalist writers by focusing on how he modifies such naturalistic values as reality, observation, and descriptions into ones which fit his pragmatic taste of art. James`s interest in naturalistic writing bridges the gap between his concern with social manners in his early novels and that with psychological exploration of individuals in his later works.

헨리 제임스의 작품에 반영된 19세기 후반 미국과 영국의 사회 개혁 운동

나희경 ( Hee Kyung Nah ) 한국아메리카학회 1997 美國學論集 Vol.29 No.1

공포쾌감과 반복강박: 『드라큘라』와 『나사못 조이기』

나희경 ( Hee Kyung Nah ) 한국근대영미소설학회 2006 근대영미소설 Vol.13 No.1

Bram Stoker`s Dracula and Henry James`s The Turn of the Screw, respectively typifying the Gothic horror thriller and the psychological ghost story, invite their readers into a particular state of mind in which such self-contradictory emotions as dread and curiosity, and abhorrence and attraction are fused. In Dracula, Stoker externalizes the supernatural vampire into a concrete visual image, the effect of which is to incite the sensational elements of horror of the reader. As a result, the reader experiences the paradoxical pleasure of terror by easily projecting his or her suppressed desire into the objectified Dracula. Meanwhile James explores the psychological features of the feeling of terror in The Turn of the Screw. In James`s novel the ghost is never objectively substantialized. Accordingly the reader of the novel gets confused in judging whether the agent of evil is the allegedly evil spirit of Peter Quint who died an unnatural tragic death or the self-deluded Miss, a living persona who is obsessed with self-imposed mission to fight against the demon which nobody except her can see. After appreciating the novel Dracula, the reader is supposed to experience catharsis which ensures the pleasure of terror, while the reader of The Turn of the Screw, who gets trapped in the a complex psychological condition of repetition compulsion, cannot completely shake off the fear and tension which he or she has undergone while reading the novel.

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.

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.