제임스의 인상론 = The Theory of Jamesian Impression

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Many critics have been arguing whether James could be classified as an impressionist or not. In "The Art of Fiction" James says a novel is a personal, a direct impression of life, which has been thought to support James as an impressionist. However I argue that Jamesian impressions have different characteristics from Impressionist ones and that these differences stand out in relief in the comparison between two contrasting representative Impressionist painters, Monet and Degas.
Monet, after one of whose paintings Impressionism was named, continuously tried to represent impressions of the moment he painted, which were transient and changing incessantly. But Degas, hating himself called impressionist, wanted to catch an eternal and perpetual rhythm in the momentary aspects of motion. Jamesian impression is, like that of Degas, reconstructed in memory and imagination. The charateristics of Jamesian impression are surmmarised as "the orgarnizing power", "compositional mind", "selective vision".
I argue, however, Jamesian impressions are not only constructed but also deconstructed. In The Ambassadors, the time difference between the moments when Strether experiences and when he puts his experiences on record renders impressions constructed afterwards. But Strether's impressions are deconstructed because they subvert such dichotomy as falsehood/truth, surface/depth, concealment/revelation. Strether's getting impressions is simillar to interpretating a text in the Barthesian sense of the word. In other words, there in neither the transcendental meaning behind the text, nor the moment that impression is completed in the text. There exists only endless reproduction
of impressions, leaving the text thicker and thicker.