에머슨의 초월주의와 미국의 금욕적 서사시

박기태 한국세계문화사학회 2019 세계 역사와 문화 연구 Vol.0 No.51

In the process of the formation and development concerning with the tradition of the American poetry, Ralph Waldo Emerson has played a meaningfully important role. So, we call him as the Orphic poet who has a remarkable position in the discussion of the American epic that is based on the ‘Transcendentalism’ Thus, ‘the Transcendentalism’, so-called, is ‘Emerson’s Transcendentalism.’ Emerson’s visionary poetics has been estimated as more stoical than any other poet’s providing the epic inspiration to common people who were encouraged to show their anti-establishment against ‘the Legalism’ and ‘the Mercantilism’. Emerson’s such approach to help common people get their personal freedom and a democratic society that the United States must seek was derived from “the Puritanism” in the 17th century. Then, Emerson’s visionary thought has been considered as a great effect on the American poets and common people with the remark “the foundation of man are not in matter, but in spirit.” However, some critics say that Emerson’s poetry is not original enough to be called as a distinctively ‘American’ epic. They also often pint out that Emerson’s creative spirit in a conventional poetic form and prosody as well as his intellectual poetics is so hard that they cannot give any common understanding to the bard and the masses of common people. Thusby, In this paper, I will examine Emerson’s transcendental views and search for the possibility to consider Emerson as a pathfinder of the American Stoical epic tradition. In addiction to the remark above, I will review a familiar set of premises that Emerson asserts with regard to the relationships of Man, Nature, and God etc..,. Finally, in the context of the American epic. with the reinterpretation of Emerson’s poetry, which has not been studied as transcendental poetry, I wish that as the American bard, Emerson will be appreciated highly. (Konyang University) 미국서사시의 형성과 발전과정에서 랄프 왈도 에머슨은 의미적으로 매우 중요한 역할을 했다. 그래서 우리가 초월주의에 근거를 두고 있는 미국의 서사시에 관련된 논의를 할 때, 그가 가지고 있는 주목할 만한 지위 때문에 그를 서사시인이라고 말한다. 이러한 까닭에 초월주의는 소위, 에머슨의 초월주의라고 한다. 에머슨의 예언자적 시학은, 미국의 대중들에게 전통적인 율법주의나 중상주의에 대항하여 그들의 도덕적 에너지나 품위 있는 목적을 가지고 미국의 본질을 구원할 반체제적 성향을 보여줄 것을 격려하며, 미국의 다른 어떤 시인들의 것보다도 금욕적인 것으로 평가되어 오고 있다. 이러한 접근방법, 즉 미국이 반드시 찾아야 할 개개인의 자유와 민주적 사회를 대중들이 쟁취하는데 도움을 준 그러한 예언자적 시학의 접근은 17세기 청교주의에서 파생되었다. 그 이후 에머슨의 예언자적 사상은 “인간의 근본은 물질에 있는 것이 아니라 정신에 있다”라는 언급과 더불어 미국의 시인들과 대중들에게 커다란 영향을 준 것으로 여겨지고 있다. 그렇지만, 비평가들이나 에머슨을 연구하는 사람들이 에머슨의 시를 명백하게 미국의 서사시로 부를 만큼 정통이 아니라고 말한다. 또한 관례적인 시의 형태나 운율에서 벗어난 매우 지적이고 창의적인 시학은 너무 어려워서 시인들이나 대중들에게 어떤 공통적인 이해를 줄 수 없다고 지적한다. 본 논문에서는 에머슨의 초월적 관점을 살펴보고 에머슨을 미국의 금욕적 서사시의 선구자로서 생각해야 할 가능성을 찾아 볼 것이다. 또한 인간과 자연 그리고 신과의 관련성에 연관된 에머슨의 주장을 검토할 것이다. 마지막으로 미국 서사시의 맥락 안에서 초월주의 시들로 연구되지 않는 경향이 있는 에머슨의 시들에 대한 재해석과 더불어 에머슨이 미국의 서사 시인으로서 높이 평가 받기를 바란다.

Emerson's Influence on Melville's Moby-Dick

윤미경 미국소설학회 2004 미국소설 Vol.11 No.2

This study examines Emerson's influence on Melville's famous work, Moby-Dick. It demonstrates Melville's deep concern and keen interest in Emerson's concept of language and transcendentalism and documents his changing attitude toward key Emersonian concepts. Melville questions and interprets Emerson's ideas of language, self-reliance and explores in detail Emerson's way of seeing nature and the world. Since Emerson's epistemology and ontology are epitomized in his essays, Melville interprets them and expresses his response in Moby-Dick. In this process he suggests the ways in which both men were geniuses of their times and possessed "a correspondent coloring."As generations of critics have noticed, Emerson's influence on Melville's work is prominent and pervasive, but it is also, at times implicit and ambiguous. In my paper, I explore the way in which Melville at once acknowledges Emerson's influence and calls a number of his crucial concepts into question. Central here are Emerson's theories of perception and interpretation and Melville's suspicious reading of Emerson's idea of language and the world.

American Newness as a Work of Cultural Renewal : Emerson"s Idea of Essay

Woosung Kang 한국아메리카학회 2005 美國學論集 Vol.37 No.1

  This essay tries to suggest a cultural reading of Emerson"s essays in the context of symbolic renewal of America, deliberating on the meaning of his difficult style and its deconstructive implication against the backdrop of the Western idea of philosophy and literature. In this critical re-examination, the death of his son in his seminal essay "Experience" (1844) marks a turning point; Emerson"s work of mourning represents the impossibility of the philosophical representation itself. This also explains why Emerson"s essay becomes itself as an essay against the "aboutness" of the essay. His apparent ease with semantic distractions rests entirely on the essay"s resistance to the idea of systematic representation. Alongside of these textual maneuvers, Representative Men shows that Emerson is no longer a romantic naturalist but a living example of what he calls "Man Thinking." He insists throughout the essays of 1840s that the American "newness," either political or cultural, depends upon whether Americans can really succeed in critical re-appropriation of the European cultural ideas. For Emerson, culture moves around the central paradox, so to speak: the real newness starts from the renewal of that very newness. And at the centre of this work of renewal Emerson posits literary essay.

에머슨의 『대표인』(Representative Men)에 나타난 동양사상

허정명(Jung Myung Huh) 한국영미어문학회 2009 영미어문학 Vol.- No.93

This paper is to look at the elements of Oriental ideas in his Representative Men in terms of Emerson's enchantment with the Oriental religions By the late 1840s, he had known oriental religions through various orientalists' introductions of them In the late 1840s, when Emerson worked on Representative Man, he was very interested in Oriental religion Emerson's journals written in the late 40s show that oriental religious ideas attracted him Representative Men shows that Emerson was able to arrive at his own truth by unifying elements in the oriental religions Emerson suggests the usefulness of great men with the interrelatedness of th individual and the universal The universal identity corresponds with the Hindu concept of the oneness of God and all things Emerson's concern with the loss of individuality shows his interest in Buddhism His discussion of life's impermanence and his association of rotation with detachment suggest the influence of Buddhism Yet Emerson does not agree with the Buddhist view that all existence is ephemeral and thus devoid of a permanent self Emerson searched into oriental religious traditions and enhanced his values and his nation's values

Emerson in Melville's Pierre

Yoon, Mee Kyung Ewha Institute of English and American Studies 2004 Journal of English and American studies Vol.3 No.-

This study examines Ralph Waldo Emerson's presence in Herman Melville's work, Pierre. Melville demonstrates his deep concern of Emerson's character and his philosophy by creating a young hero, Pierre who is pursuing Emerson's optimistic idealism and transcendentalism. However, Melville questions Emerson's way of thinking such as self-reliance and subjectivity and at the same time criticizes Emerson's cold nature. Expecially, Melville deconstructs Emrson's epistemology and ontology through the image of the "eye" which epitomizes Melville's response to and interpretation of Emerson. As several critics have noticed, Emrson's presence in Pierre is explicit and prominent. An Emersonian origin is suggested by figure of Plotinus Plinlimmon who resembles Emerson in several ways. His insistence on maintaining an absolute distinction between earthly and heavenly truth while serving as the leader of a group of young Platonists and casting a condemning eye on Pierre and his idealistic enterprise makes him a perfect object for Melville's satire of Emersonian intuition and the theory of transcendentalism.

"Transcendental" Aesthetics: Emerson's Impersonality and Kant's Imprisonment

Cheol-U Jang 한국아메리카학회 2013 美國學論集 Vol.45 No.2

This essay, juxtaposing spontaneous judgment and reflective judgment, investigates how the philosophical term "transcendental" in American idealism has a slightly different meaning from that in German transcendental idealism. Ralph Waldo Emerson's "transcendental," which is rather impersonal, undoes "subject," while Immanuel Kant's "transcendental" imprisons the subject in the relationship between man and world. Their philosophical loci are the self. Emerson is interested in impersonal condition while Kant is deeply concerned with the condition of subjectivity. Comparing Emerson to Kant in their aesthetics, I illustrate the subject's role in their philosophy. Focusing on Emerson's essays, I examine how spontaneity is akin to intuition in terms of philosophical concepts. Because of the self who actively invites the exterior world, not passively encounters, I argue that Emerson's account of the impersonal is relevant to spontaneous judgment. On the contrary, Kant's subject is relevant to reflective judgment in a way that allows sensible intuition based on the receptivity of impression. Therefore, the two philosophers wrestle with the self in a different way. According to both thinkers, the philosophical term "transcendental" is floating between self and selfless. It shows that intellectual intuition is the primary factor in comparing Emerson's account of spontaneous judgment with Kant's reflective judgment; the former integrates two hemispheres, intellectual intuition and sensible intuition while the latter denies that integration. Hence, the spontaneous judgment opens the door of the self which the personal goes out of and the impersonal goes into.

에머슨의 정치성 논란

김은형(EunHyoung Kim) 한국아메리카학회 2009 美國學論集 Vol.41 No.3

It is not easy to understand precisely where Emerson's politics stands. The major reason for such ambiguity in the thinker's political stance lies in his use of an abstract and universal language in expounding his philosophy. The best way to understand his specific political position would therefore be to analyze what result was produced when his abstract language was directly faced with one of the historical events of his time. The present paper thus examines how Emerson responded to the most pressing issue of the era-i.e., slavery-by analyzing one of his apparently political addresses, “The Fugitive Slave Law.” The process of this analysis reveals the fact that Emerson, as an ardent philosopher, answered the critical moral crisis of his nation, which slavery was dangerously splitting into the sections, by radically refining his transcendental individualism. In order to deter the aggressive extension of slavery not only to new territories but also to the existing North, which seemed possible after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, this individualist philosopher argued that every individual, including himself, should be morally sensitive enough to distinguish what was universally good and what was universally bad, regardless of any positive law such as the Constitution and the Union, both of which were based on a corrupt compromise over slavery. Moreover, in this address, Emerson exhaustively examined and remarkably redressed morally wrong premises originally lying in his philosophy of individualism. Through this drastic process of examination and readjustment of his philosophy, his individualism was reborn into a transcendental moral principle by which each individual could keenly sense universal or moral truths and immediately put them into action at any cost. Granted, Emerson revealed his premodern limitations in this process: his elitist historical view that saw the abominable law as brought about only by Daniel Webster's personal influence and the ignorant masses’ reckless obedience to the hero. In addition, even though he successfully cooperated with radical abolitionists through the transformation of his philosophy into a more morally active individualism, his specific suggestions for the resolution of the slavery issue turned out to be not settled but still conservative, as revealed in his suggestion of compensated emancipation for the sake of slaveholders and national safety. However, in spite of all Emerson's political limitations as a Whig elitist and conservative, it would be more appropriate to assess together the drastic dialogical process of his thought and action, through which he became a committed abolitionist and overcame his corrupt philosophical premises. Only after considering both his political limitations and his vigorous and arduous philosophical progress toward a morally and practically improved version of individualism can we properly understand the significance of Emerson's politics -i.e., how this conservative and elitist individualist could become not only an abolitionist, which he originally had detested to be, but also one of the most influential philosophers who laid the philosophical foundation of American democracy.

랠프 월도 에머슨의 「시인론」과 시

윤석임 국제언어문학회 2022 國際言語文學 Vol.- No.53

본 연구의 목적은 19세기 초 미국의 초월주의 전통을 정립한 랠프월도 에머슨(Ralph Waldo Emerson)의 산문, 「시인론」(“The Poet,” 1843)을 통해 그의 시적 이론과 사상을 알아보고 그의 시학이 시편들에 어떻게 구현되었는지를 면밀히 살펴보고자 한다. 에머슨은 「시인론」에서 시의 대상, 주제와 범주를 제시하고 동시에 시인을 정의내리고, 시인이 사용하고 있는 방법과 소재를 비롯하여 시 예술의 전반적인양상을 고찰하고 있다. 시각을 통해 전달된 자연의 아름다움은 시인의상상력과 통찰력, 그리고 유기적인 시적 창조과정을 거치게 되면 더욱고귀하고 유기적인 형태로 시인의 마음속에 선율로 변하고 표현된 시구에는 신성한 기운마저 담기게 된다. 시인은 말하는 자, 이름을 지어주는 자, 자연의 아름다움을 묘사하는 자이며 다른 이가 예언하지 못한것을 알려주는 신의 해설자이자, 유동적으로 변해가는 현상과 다양성속에 감추어져 있는 상징적 의미와 진실을 밝혀내는 유일한 학자이다. 시인에게 있어 시를 짓는 것은 운율을 만들어 내는 내용이므로 사상이형식보다 앞선다. 이러한 그의 시학은 에머슨의 다양한 시편들 - 「호박벌」, 「로도라 꽃」, 「우화」, 「안녕」, 「브라마」, 「개체와 전체」, 「세계영혼」, 「숲의 노래」 등 - 에 시적 승화되어 표현되고 있다. 산문과 시가 함께상보적 역할을 하며 에머슨 시학의 최종적 목표인 “완전한 전체(the perfect whole)”를 이루고 있다. This study compares Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poetics explicated in his essay, “The Poet” with his well-known poems. It examines the essay where Emerson apparently defines what the features and functions of the poet are, and what means and materials he uses. And then, it analyzes how Emerson practices and embodies his idealistic and theoretical poetics in his representative poems. Emerson’s poetry shows as clearly as his essay his poetics aiming at figuring out the secret of the world by examining appearances where being passes into, and unity out of variety through a deep insight. His poems, as well as his essay, endeavor to discover the essential beauty in a wide spectrum of the materialistic world by means of the integrity of man and nature, reality and ideal, earthly things and symbolic divinity, and even eastern and western cultures. In this attempt, Emerson’s essay, “The Poet” and his poems form an inseparable and complementary pair, being very useful tools for his readers to achieve the perfect whole understanding of his poetics.

Twain’s Contestation of Emersonian Transcendental Manhood in Huckleberry Finn

박준형 한국영어영문학회 2012 영어 영문학 Vol.58 No.6

This essay “Twain’s Contestation of Emersonian Transcendental Manhood in Huckleberry Finn” explores how Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) manifests his postwar contestation of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s transcendental manhood that endorses the dogmatic,egocentric, and decorporealized position of the Cartesian subject, who believes his being’s unity, elevation, and centrality through his fantasy of possessing direct access to divine truth. The connection between Emerson and Twain is based not on Emerson’s influence on Twain but on their common interest in American landscape as a site for the redefinition of manhood and masculinity. I examine different types of manhood in their association with nature in Huckleberry Finn by comparing them with the two fundamental concepts of Emerson’s philosophy: “a true man” in “Self-Reliance” (1841) and transparent eyeball vision in Nature (1836). Twain’s use of Huck’s ambivalent position—his centrality as a protagonist in the novel in spite of his marginality in society—renegotiates Emerson’s valorization of nonconformity, wholeness, and nonchalance as the characteristics of both boyhood and “a true man,” Emerson’s term for the ideal individual in “Self-Reliance.” I also read Twain’s satire of two different types of masculine characters —Bob and the Child of Calamity, boatmen of the Southern frontier, and Colonel Grangerford,patriarch of a Southern aristocratic family—as Twain’s denouncement of the antebellum desire for transcendental vision, which Emerson crystalizes into his notion of transparent eyeball in Nature.

에머슨과 휘트먼에 대한 해체적 접근

홍승현(Hong, Seung-hyun) 한국외국어대학교 외국문학연구소 2005 외국문학연구 Vol.- No.19

New Criticism has shown its quest of the central meaning in texts. On the contrary, deconstructive criticism defies the determinacy of meaning and relies on constantly unfolding nature of texts. The speaker's unreliability and the uncertainty of text has become one of critical issues on the deconstructive agenda. In this essay, I explore Ralph Waldo Emerson's and Walt Whitman's poetry from various deconstructive critical methods. It is necessary to come up with an alternative not based in the scheme of new criticism, but in Deconstruction, when it comes to interpret the poetry of Emerson and Whitman. Emerson is very eager to establish the relation between human and nature and to reverse his thesis, basing upon paradox and delayed judgement. Whitman's repetition of center and decenter in pursuing his self has a similar pattern of Emerson's. Both Emerson and Whitman tend to show postmodernist characteristics, because they breed the giant that destroys and deconstructs themselves. For Emerson's ｢Each and All｣ and ｢The Rhodora｣, my emphasis is on the correspondence between inner human spirit and outer nature, by borrowing Melanie Klein's “projection and introjecton”, D. W. Winnicott's “transitional objects” and Jacques Lacan's “Real order”. I examine Whitman's ｢Song of Myself｣, by using the concept of Paul De Man's “allegory”. Conclusively, deconstructive re-reading of Emerson and Whitman helps us to uncover their poetry with a new perspective and open attitude.